The Day of Dread(s)


Advertisement
Australia's flag
Oceania » Australia » Victoria » Melbourne » St Kilda
January 19th 2011
Published: December 4th 2011
Edit Blog Post

Day 136-137

19th-20th January

The day arrived for Ellory to get his dreads, there wasn’t really room for me to hang around the shop while he got them done, so I was to undertake a most important task. Booking our flights home. Yes we had decided that we were going to head back to England at the beginning of February, we were due to start work again on the 6th March and we needed to find somewhere to live so we thought we’d give ourselves a couple of weeks in England to deal with that. We’d spent the previous evening listing all the things we’d like to do in our remaining time and worked out we should be able to do everything and fly home on around the 8th February. So I had a list of locations to fly to in Australia, some plans for hiring a car as well and I was ready! Ellory went to the dreads place and I went to the flight centre. My list of requirements went like this…

- A hire car so we could drive from Melbourne to Sydney

- A flight from Sydney to Uluru

- A flight from Uluru to Cairns

- A flight from Cairns to Sydney

- A flight from Sydney to London

I think I confused the heck out of the lovely lady that helped me but believe or not we worked all of this out and managed to get all of this for the amazing price of just over £2000 for both of us. I have absolutely no idea how this was possible, a complete bargain!! I think it was because we were bulk buying J. Then it came to paying for it, I planned to put it on my debit card and then pay it off when I got back to the hostel, but for reasons unknown to me, the flight centre in Australia doesn’t take UK Visa Debit…. Or my card was having a hissy fit. But I couldn’t pay, I nearly cried! Thankfully they agreed to hold our reservation until the end of the day so I could find an internet connection and transfer some money over to our pay as you go credit card which I know works!! So I went to see Ellory, see how he was getting on and explain the drama. Half his hair had been done and it was very different to the flowing locks he had been sporting for so long while he was growing his hair for this moment! They had ipads with wifi at the dreads place so I decided to do the money transfer there. However, as it was a different device to what I normally use when I log onto our internet banking, the company wigged out and blocked our account! Gaaaahhhh!!!!



I was honestly about to have a major hissy fit but this needed to be sorted so I had no choice but to walk all the way back to our hostel, get the bank details and phone the UK. Thank goodness my bank does 24hr telephone banking and got my card unblocked very quickly. I was then able to transfer money around, powerwalk back to the Flight Centre and pay for all of our plane tickets. Finally after several hours and major stress we had plane tickets home and could relax knowing everything was all organised for our remaining weeks in Australia. The timing was excellent as Ellory had just finished having his hair dreaded, he was thrilled to bits with them and after being given a huge bag of aftercare stuff we stopped at a bar for a restorative bottle of wine, we both needed it!



This took most of the day but we made plans for the next day to meet up with Fiona, a friend of ours from London who was spending time in Australia on her way to New Zealand.



The next morning was our last in the hostel in St Kildas and we had to check out and pick up our hire car before we met up with Fiona for lunch. Once again we got our backpacks, extra bags, day bags and cool bag all organised and left them in the hostel’s storage while we headed to the CBD and Europcar to get our car which would take us to Sydney where we were meeting up with more friends from London, Wade and Melissa who lived in Wollongong and were going to have us to stay for a week. Picking up the car wasn’t a problem, but we were unable to hire a sat nav which threw us a bit. The reason Ellory and I always drive with a sat nav is because we both get extremely stressed when lost and it just isn’t worth the hassle! However we had no choice so Ellory loaded up with maps and we prepared to drive back to our hostel. You know what we didn’t do too badly, there were several wrong turns involved and I was a little scared by a unique feature of Melbourne’s road system, the hook turn, where you have to get into the left lane to turn right. Horrible things! But we both kept our cool and finally navigated our way out of the CBD and back to St Kildas. Just in time to pack up the car and then Fiona arrived. We love seeing familiar faces from home and as Fiona was planning on staying in New Zealand for a couple of years after leaving Australia it was nice to spend some time together as we knew it would be while before we saw each other again! We went for a lovely lunch at a restaurant on the beach where Fiona and I had really yummy fish and chips and Ellory had a pizza. We just had enough time to hang out on the beach afterwards for a while and then it was time to go our separate ways, Fiona to meet up with some friends and us to start to drive to Sydney.



We again managed to get onto the road we needed and started our drive. We planned to take 3 days to drive to Sydney so we didn’t have to spend all day driving and on our first night we got tired around about the time we reached a tiny place called Sale. We found a weird cheap motel, it seemed to be really big but it was completely deserted and as the restaurant was shut (as everything appeared to be in the town-it wasn’t that late!) I ended up walking to the petrol station to get food. The woman in there was so rude to me! They were due to shut in 5 minutes but I was super quick and very polite (I’m British don’t you know!) so I thought her behaviour was a little uncalled for. However I managed to get some food for dinner and some bread (we already had butter and marmite in the cool bag) for breakfast. We just ended up having a quiet night in our room as there was nothing going on in that strange little town!



p.s forgot to add that we managed to squeeze in a call to England to our friend Laura to wish her a very happy birthday and to say congratulations as her and her other half, Rob had just got engaged, congratulations to the both of you! xxx

Advertisement



Tot: 0.119s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 9; qc: 54; dbt: 0.0725s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb