Bounce trip to Townsville

Brisbane to Townsville and back in a day is a rather hectic affair.

The flight out of Brisbane was for 8:40am arriving at Townsville at 10:40am but it managed to arrive 10 minutes early which were absorbed by the rental car folk dealing with their crashed booking system.

Planted my arse into a Nissan Pulsar with 9,000km on the clock and took off towards Wulguru. 20 minutes later I'm walking into the reception at the Cluden Park Motor Inn and saying hi to Vicki. Now spelling Vicki with an I on the end is apparently rare. I know this because my mother has the same name. Vicki was surprised that I remembered how it was spelt.

The site inspection took about an hour. I have quickly learned to take photos of absolutely everything that is even remotely associated with a possible installation - these take time. Turns out that there isn't any method of installing the equipment into the rooms neatly. So I will have to make up kits for the guests to use to connect themselves up with. Not perfect but the best solution given the situation.

After that I called the Coast Guard and made a time to meet them at 1:30pm, this gave me an hour for lunch which consisted of HJ's Country Chicken bagettes at Tim's place. After using him for his toilet facilities and chatting about his absurd addiction to Silkroad Online I ventured off towards the Townsville Port area to have a look at the Coast Guard building.

Half an hour later I arrived at the Coast Guard. Its an odd building as it's a two story concrete box sitting in the middle of no where on the breakwater. Its destined to be relocated to another water side location so not a lot has been done with the building for quite sometime - apart from the occasional repaint. What is odd is that it was designed to have a third and possibly fourth floor added so the roof is solid concrete. This poses a slight problem for me as I can't easily stick a hole in it for the antenna cable. I'll have to run the cable outside and up for about a meter.

While at the coast guard they were keen to show me around their million dollar vessel with twin 400hp screws and spacious interior - I wouldn't mind one.

After that I had about an hour to kill before I needed to be at the airport so I went back to Tim's place and veged out a bit more. Once at the airport I dropped the keys off for the car and waited an extra 20 minutes because of some issue with some luggage some guy had on the plane :/.

The flight back was fine although the landing was a bit hairy due to a huge cross wind - the plane had to accelerate when close to the ground to defeat the wind - makes for a slightly rougher landing. I quickly made my way out of the airport and paid the $28 for parking. The trip home was pretty good, no jams and managed to keep to the full speed limit. Arrived back at home at 7:30pm.