Small Plane to the Big Smoke

Before my flight back from Roma to the big smoke aka Brisbane I put an embarrassing amount of time and energy into selecting my seat and ended up neatly between two windows with no view at all and no future career as an aeroplane seat selector.  The itty bitty plane was chockablock with FIFO workers, all loud and merry on their way home.  The fellow beside me put a movie on his laptop and promptly went to sleep, so in the absence of a window I watched his movie instead.  He had headphones on so I couldn't hear a thing, but the movie involved lots of running around, blowing things up, and shooting people so it kept me entertained while he slowly slumped further and further into the aisle and snored all the way to Brisbane.

Ambling out to the plane on a chilly Roma morning.

In Brisbane world I sat in a windowless room learning things, which was both interesting and excessively tedious although I was quite excited to find out that all the faces I'd seen on video for the last 2+ years actually belonged to real, live, carbon-based life forms and we could all have lunch together and even go out to dinner and have real conversations without having to remind each other to take ourselves off mute and/or turn our cameras on/off.  Released from the purgatory of windowless rooms and overstimulated by conversations with real people,  I visited Victoria Park for a spot of wide open space and fresh-air therapy.

City views from Victoria Park which, if you couldn't guess, was once a golf course.

 

Getting in the swing of this park exploration lark, I followed up with a wander through the Roma St Parklands.

The Roma St Parklands had lots of big spiders and pretty leaves.

I crossed the Brisbane River on the brand new (to me) Kurilpa pedestrian bridge.

It really does look like the result of one of those classroom activities where children are given toothpicks and dental floss to construct experimental designs.

On the other side of the river I wandered around GOMA, seeking self-improvement and culture, which I think I found.

 

At night I watched the city lights from my hotel window as little planes sparkled across the sky on their way to the airport.

Via the magic of buses, trains, and planes I visited Toowoomba, caught up with siblings back in Brisbane, and 2 weeks and almost 6000km after I left I landed back at Adelaide airport.

Brisbane Airport had bigger planes than Roma Airport.  My seating neighbour was a nice physio fro the Yorke Peninsula.  She went to sleep but she didn't snore or put on a movie.  I had to read my own book instead because even though I had a window seat it was dark outside so there wasn't much to see.

Until the very end, when I had a grand view of Glenelg as we took a long loop out over the Gulf St Vincent on the way into Adelaide.

I'm glad to be home (well, someone else's home anyway) and able to wear my pyjamas to work which I don't do, if course, but I could if I wanted to and that's the important thing.