I am not a big fan of hills on inline skates. The point between being in control and passing that point where you can slalom your way down or easily stop comes faster than you might think. At least it does for me, maybe I just need more hill practice?
I am in luck, sounds like there is some hill practice in store for me.
Public transportation around here looks pretty well done. There are an incredible amount of buses anyway. I checked out their website, and it looked like the cheapest and easiest way to use the system was to buy a Go Card:
Process is simple enough. Buy a card, add money to it, tap the terminal when you get on the bus/train/ferry, and tap a terminal when you leave. 7-11 sells the cards, and I already found that.
I have never seen my phone this happy with me before:
Usually I am FAR below what it thinks I should walk in a day. I do skate a couple of times a week, and it doesn’t track that… Still, I’ve never seen it all green and happy before.
I have no actual money on me. I was going to withdraw some in the US and convert here, but I forgot to do that. I did let my credit card company know I would be here, and planned to use my phone to pay everywhere that I could. Not having any experience with retailers here, I am assuming they all take credit cards, but even where we live there are some retailers that do not.
Like I mentioned before, I avoided food on the flights and my travel time was 24 or 26 hours or something. I had 3 granola bars and a bit of water. Starting to get hungry.
There is a handful of us standing around waiting for the train. Subjects of note: old Chinese dude and two Australians.
Chinese guy very polite, lets me on the train first. Then he sits right behind me, and one of the Australians sits across the aisle from me.
The Chinese guy is learning English. Here to visit Family. Oooh he’s a talker and really difficult to understand, but given he’s learning English, he’s doing a great job at it. He is chatting at me and the Australian across from me.
Months ago I decided I would buy a train ticket from the Brisbane airport to Central Station which is reasonably close to my hotel.
When I arrived, I found a staffed train booth in the airport. My train papers confused her deeply. Mostly the fact that the sheets I printed out were in US dollars and she didn’t know how she could even print out a ticket like that. She sent me on to an actual train depot; where I would have to go to catch it anyway, so not like out of my way.
Those two words seem like a contradiction. I did book my flights with premium economy tickets though, and I think I’m glad…?
It added quite a bit of money to the price, but with my travel stress I thought maybe that would soothe me back down. At the very least I could be more comfortably stressed.
The seats and service were pretty nice. Obviously the crappy little planes out of Medford don’t offer that, but my other two legs do (the 12-13 trip and the 3-4 hour trip).
Made it to my hotel in Brisbane.
Interesting experience for me, I get anxious about the travel. I don’t mind the act of the traveling so much, it is the “where do I go next,” under a time limit that stresses me out, and whether there will be delays, and THEN what do I do…
Aging Skater 