Wednesday, 20 April
And what a night it was!
Full details, as you'd expect, can be found on the website's Music Pages, as well as the LHoC Music blog (same content, different location), and tapping out that content took care of most of the pre-checkout time at the Hilton, with the process of composition interspersed with phone calls from Madam to advise possible complications after an electrical storm on the Gold Coast and a quick excursion in search of a substantial breakfast since I wasn't sure whether, or when, we'd be having lunch.
Cafe Rosso in the Galeries Victoria took care of that concern, and while there isn't much room for variation in the big cooked breakfast, what arrived was the usual substantial offering that combined to fill the gaping hole after the previous night's excitement relegated dinner to the status of a toasted sandwich and provide the fuel to keep things going until a meal opportunity some time later in the day.
With the Hilton offering an eleven o'clock checkout, the game plan after breakfast was to wait till a quarter to eleven, and then hoof it across to the night's accommodation (Travelodge Wentworth) where I could tap away on the iPad till the shuttle bus lobbed Madam on the doorstep and we could check in.
Which was the way things panned out, though as you might expect there was the odd complication in the form of a later discovery that I'd left the mobile phone charger in the room at the Hilton, something that isn't as hard to accomplish as you might think.
The bench beside the glass topped desk featured an array of assorted items, all of them black, and most of them with cables attached.
As an Apple partisan, I'm used to cables and such being a distinctive white rather than a blend in with the surroundings sable. The sight of a white cable (this is what I managed to convince myself in hindsight) would have registered as something that needed checking while the little black devil just blended in with it's non-Apple brothers and sisters.
In any case, that was still a while away.
In the meantime I tapped away, and Madam's arrival was the signal to check in and head off to World Square in search of lunch.
Now, the lunch side of things was very much Madam's department and at this point in time I wouldn't have recognized Din Tai Fung if the establishment had come up and taken a nip at my big toe.
The first sign that we were in for something special was the sign outside the premises advising that the establishment had no link to any other operation in Australia.
Obviously, I thought, there must be imitators.
Inside, I found what amounted to a variation on the old yum cha theme, with the main difference being that rather than having women wheeling around trolleys of delicacies and trying to interest the clientele, here there was an order form on the table, you made your selections from it, and the desired delicacies were delivered to your table.