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Published: February 9th 2022
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We decide to give ourselves a day off from sight seeing. News from home suggests that they’re going to be locked down for at least the next two weeks so we take our cue to spend the day trying to work out how and where we’re going to extend our time up here in warmth and freedom. We briefly consider heading across to North Queensland until we realise that this is now also a COVID hotspot, and if we go anywhere near it they’ll lock us up and throw away the key when we get home. (I'm not quite sure why but "locked up" somehow sounds a lot worse than "locked down".) We decide to opt for a few nights in a tent in the Kimberleys near Kununurra, followed by a week in Darwin. It’s a pity I haven’t been able convince Issy that we should stay here in Broome. I’ve been hearing ads on the radio for the upcoming Miss Cable Beach competition. It’s not quite a wet t-shirt competition, but I’m sure some of the attributes required would have been simliar. I was hoping she could have put at least some of all that hard training to good use.
We head into Chinatown in the late afternoon for a drink with Peter and Teresa. The whole place looks totally deserted. If there are 88,000 people in town at the moment, not too many of them are here.
We’ve booked seats to see a movie at the Sun Picture Theatre - the oldest still operating “outdoor picture garden” in the world. The movie is almost irrelevant; we’re really only here for the experience. The moon and a particularly bright star sitting right above the screen are a bit of a distraction, but it seems that the distractions are only just getting started. It’s an action movie and we hear a helicopter about to make an entrance to one of the scenes. Wait on, it’s not in the movie, it’s a real and very loud helicopter circling overhead. We’re not quite sure why it’s there. We’ve seen lots of ads for helicopter tours since we’ve been here, but we’re not sure there’d be too much to see at night. Next up is the sound of a small plane about to enter a scene, but wrong again, it's a real plane coming in to land right over our heads. Hmmm. It seems that the Broome airport is not too far away and the theatre looks like it’s right under the flight path. I guess this wasn’t much an issue when it first opened back in 1916. I wonder if they tried to get the airport built somewhere else, or at least make sure it had a curfew on movie nights. It seems the small plane was only an entree. Next cab off the rank is a large jet. It looks like it’s about to defoliate the palm trees next to our seats. The noise is deafening. Our ears are ringing, and we miss several minutes of movie dialogue. I hope it wasn’t important. We get the giggles. We did just come here for the experience, and I guess that’s what we've got. It's all very pleasant, and relaxing; well relaxing most of the time.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Locked up vs. locked down
Indeed a better mental picture. The outdoor picture garden sounds great.