Sunday, 3 November 2013
A phone call from The Dalby Doylamo may have roused me from the depths of slumber somewhere around six on the final morning of this little odyssey, but it was the best part of an hour before I emerged from the cot to join Madam and The Golfer to watch the final stages of the Australia vs Fiji game in the Rugby League World Cup.
I don’t have anything in the way of an accurate recollection of incoming calls, but I was half asleep for a fair while before I finally decided to emerge and greet the day. The Doylamo, of course, wouldn’t have been needing to adjust the body clock, and could feel quite justified in calling The Golfer to check whether he was watching the football.
For my part, however, the question of adjusting the body clock was a key issue, given the fact that dinner had been around my regular bed time, and we’d sat up to watch the end of a remarkable Indian innings in the final one dayer in Bangalore.
On that basis, I reckoned I could have lasted a little longer in a half-doze if a less active mind had permitted it.
Once I had emerged we watched Australia put away a remarkably un-Fijian looking Fiji and skipped across to the sports news updates where I learned the Australian run chase had fallen comfortably short of India’s 6 for 383.
I grabbed a shower straight after that little snippet, and opted for toast and vegemite for breakfast after a good fortnight of eating and drinking that suggested a light breakfast and plenty of Vitamin B were the way to go.
We took our time over the breaky table, and it was comfortably after 9:40 when we turned onto Bowen Road, heading for the regulation visit to Angelina’s Deli at Fairfield Waters on the way out of town.
I’d carefully opted to deliver a couple bottles of white wine into The Golfer’s Motel a fortnight earlier, and since that had required an esky to keep the chilled articles at the right temperature we had the right vessel to store a selection of cheeses and salami on the two and a half hour journey back to Bowen.
Actually, with the inevitable delays for road works and stops at the markets in Ayr and the Home Hill Comfort Stop it was just over three hours later when we pulled into the driveway at the Little House of Concrete, bringing the latest odyssey to a successful conclusion.
That wasn’t quite the end of travel related activities, what with the unloading and unpacking and all, and it was a while before the feline population decided to acknowledge our actual return, but that’s enough as far as The Travelogue content is concerned.
The Astute Reader will, of course, twig to the time discrepancy between the date at the header of this little piece and the day when it actually appears on the LHoC website and travel blog. That’s a function of the difficulty in keeping this stuff up to date while you’re on the road, and the need to proofread, insert extra detail, proofread again, add photographic content and hyperlinks.
On that basis, The Astute Reader will gather where Hughesy’s headed from here...