Last Day in Airlie (sniff!)

Woke up ridiculously early, followed shortly by Nikki, who began packing up her bits and pieces so as to be able to check out and catch the early Greyhound to Townsville. I decided to start my marathon photo uploading and blogging session, so just chilled out in the room doing that.

We had planned to go to the lagoon for the day, but it wasn’t really the weather for it, so once Jana got up, we decided to do something constructive and so put some washing on. Although I still think my original method of washing clothes whilst in the shower is perfectly acceptable, Jana insisted on us using the washing machine!

After that and a bit more blogging, we went for a walk into town and had a meander around some of the shops, before hitting Maccas for some more wifi! On sitting down in my favourite spot (the same as the previous evening) we had a re-enactment of the saga with the cricket – suddenly a cricket, uncannily identical to the one from last night, leapt up on the seat and proceeded to hop about until I was able to catch it in a napkin and take it outside! Does this mean I’ll now have double the luck?!

We returned to the YHA and sorted out our washing (even using the dryer!) and sorted out our bags a bit, in preparation for departure in the morning. We decided to have a bit of a night out, so made ourselves some dinner and then got ready before heading out.

We weren’t sure where we should go, so first we went to Beaches – the same place we went to when we got back from the boat. We had a drink in there but it was a bit dead so we moved on to Magnums. We got a drink and realised it was a bit dead in there too; it’s a really big place but most people seemed to be sat along the really long benches at the front.

Jana spotted a girl she recognised as being from our room (I had no recollection whatsoever of her, but she seemed to know who we were!), so sat us down on the bench next to her and the two girls she was with. After a few minutes, the bench filled up to my left and those people started talking to me. They were a bunch of Queensland rugby players, of all ages, on tour and they were trying to guess where my accent was from. After incorrectly guessing Scotland and Wales, they eventually got to England. The guy sat next to me, the Club Captain, correctly guessed London, then said “Clapham South” to which I shook my head, then he said “Uxbridge”. My jaw hit the floor! I looked about on the table in case something with my address had slipped out of my bag, but there was nothing. After a lot of ‘OMG’, he was equally as stunned as I was when I told him he was right! Turned out he lived in the UK for a while, in Clapham South first and then lived in Uxbridge for 8 months before his working visa ran out! How small is the world!?!

We talked about everything from Uxbridge to Aussie animals and I told them about my recent run in with two golden orb spiders, then shortly afterwards there was a bit of a saga when a tiger snake suddenly slithered from out of nowhere onto the pathway and one of the players moved it out of the path and back into the garden. It must have been at least 8ft long and was actually quite pretty in its colourings, although I wasn’t too keen to get too close. We spent the rest of the evening chatting to our new found friends, all of whom were very funny and had us in stitches! One of them had the BEST tattoo I have ever seen - a comedy moustache on the inside of his index finger - so we all then drew different shaped moustaches on our fingers and had a good giggle with them! A really fun way to say farewell to Airlie.