This should keep my blog full for a couple of months.
Cheers
Danny
My first encounter with Hunter S Thompson and how he changed my holidays Part 8
*Lazin’*
The next few days were just for relaxing.
We decided to go and have a look in Brisbane.
It was really weird - beside being nice and clean and having bugger all traffic, they had lines painted down the middle of the foot path so that pedestrians kept to the left no matter which direction they were heading. We waited to cross at an intersection and were highly amused when the traffic went one way, the pedestrian lights said DON’T WALK, then the lights changed for the traffic going the other way but they still said DON’T WALK.
Then it flashed WALK and it was movement in every direction.
People streamed everywhere. Crisscrossing , straight.
I saw some guy waiting to do a U turn and he was too slow his car looked like in was being attacked by ants.
Something you never see at home but it seemed to keep things flowing.
We bought some colourful Tee Shirts to try and fit in but our pasty white skin gave us away.
The public transport in Brisbane was exceptional and you get anywhere you wanted as long as you knew where you wanted to go.
Luckily for us my sister had fistfuls of timetables and brochures for us.
We even headed down to Dreamworld for the day.
Back in 1984 it was still pretty new and a big novelty.
Martin and I loved it.
The place was virtually empty, they had beer in the kiosks and the rides were fantastic.
It was the first time I went on a roller coaster that did a loop the loop , not one but two in a row.
The closet thing I have got to Disneyland so far in my life.
We even bought super size sombrero hats and bull horn bottle openers to hang around our necks.
Which was ultra daggy and downright dangerous on anything that went fast and downhill due to the bottle opener bouncing off your chest and smacking you in the face or the sombrero flicking back and its strap strangling you.
But it was our fashion statement to the great state of Queensland.
Linda didn’t live far from the beach, so a couple of times we even strolled down there and just laze next to the shore and read or just hang out with a couple of beers.
Once Martin fell asleep and I left a note on him saying
FREE TO GOOD HOME
And then I walked home.
He woke up to all these school kids throwing peanuts at him, thinking he was a homelss drunk , he woke up foaming and drooling and chased them away.
Obviously no one wanted a rabid stray.
I was continually reading sections of my Hunter S thompson book and decided since we only had 4 days left we should make a concerted effort to get down to the Gold Coast and spend the night.
The HST way.
The HST way meant just Martin and myself no change of clothes or toiletries just us and money.
There was to be no pre organisation except the tickets to and from our destination on the bus. It took me thirty seconds to convince Martin it would be a good idea so we booked our bus tickets and arranged to go the following morning, a Thursday.
We told Rob and Lin that we would call them when we got back to Brisbane and if we liked it may stay another day. Martin insisted that we take his little QANTAS travel bag so he could carry a book and his transistor now only half full of dope. I threw in comb for good measure.
So we had our total requirements for our night out on the Gold Coast.
The Bus left home about 8.30AM so we had a good early start so we were confident we would find somewhere to stay and something to do.
We were young, dumb and one us dangerously stupid off to spend sometime in a strange place the Hunter S Thompson way.
Next week: Part 9 The Gold Coast Experience (Stage 1)
