26 October 2024
Bus fight
Virgin Australia to Cairns
Right now I am sitting in the Melbourne Virgin Australia lounge having some fruit toast as there is no food on my flights today. 10 hours of no food and nothing but water on offer.
There is also no lounge in Cairns, which is my stopover spot for an hour or so after a 4 hour flight from Melbourne. So no food today, just fruit toast and then sippy cups of sneezed on water.
Getting to the airport was already a source of adventure. I take the Skybus because I am a notorious tight ass and I do not like getting in some dudes car who downloaded an app and 10 minutes later became a qualified professional driver. Having said that, the Skybus still has no seat belts, despite travelling along the freeway at 100kmph. I digress (already).
The bus leaves about once every 15 minutes, it pulled up just as I got there and a guy got on ahead of me, there were not many people around. So we might have to wait a few minutes for a few more people and for the proper departure time. Anyway this normal looking guy starts ranting about how he is late and why the hell is the bus not leaving etc. Eventually he goes downstairs and starts abusing the driver and ticket checker outside and then gets back on the bus and demands it leave immediately. They tell him he is now not going to travel on the bus and he should get off. So he refuses of course. I stuck my head down the stairs to see what is going on and he was standing in the door not letting anyone else on while continuing to argue, 'if I cant go on the bus no one can'. Great.
Anyway after about 5 minutes the transit cops came and the guy sprinted off when he saw them. I watched him running away out of the front of the upper deck bus window and he was looking over his shoulder running and veered into the wall. Good times.
Now for some more fruit toast, not sure if I will have time to type more nonsense from Cairns or even when I arrive in Tokyo tonight.
The traditional departure photo, taken the evening before departure. What is this? It is the view of the new feature from my apartment window. Scaffolding. A few years ago they added 3 more levels to my building, and wisely constructed them out of highly flammable petrol soaked plastic. So now they have to rip that down and rebuild it. I predict the scaffolding will be there for a year. I get to watch hi vis guys swearing and smoking all day.
This is just a space filler photo really. The Virgin Lounge in Melbourne. At least you can get a quiet seat in here, unlike the Sydney one in which you generally have to fight 10 guys just to get a cup of warm tap water. It is a good thing I can sit far away from others as the roof structure in here really helps amplify the sounds of everyone's horrific expulsions of holiday ruining pathogens.
And here are some jets (photographed through a blurry window), including mine. I will go all the way to Japan on a tiny 737 Max death plane supplied by the fine folks at Boeing who no longer tighten bolts.