I spent another night in the less-than-pleasant YHA in Alice Springs and caught the shuttle bus to the airport next morning. Once again it took an age to get to the airport and I regretted drinking a large amount of orange juice before leaving. I went through security and was randomly selected to have my bag, and indeed, my person to be checked for bombs and traces of bomb making materials. I felt like a criminal! Was oddly exciting.

It was a hugely boring flight and I was very happy to get off the plane in Sydney. I arrived back in Sydney on the Thursday and Lee-ann was due to join me on the Sunday. Matt once again kindly allowed me to crash at his place and so it was very early on Sunday morning that I met Lee-ann at the international terminal.

It wasn’t until she was right in front of me that I spotted her, she had cut and dyed her hair into a funky colour and had lost a lot of weight. We had a big hug and made our way over to the domestic terminal to put Lee-ann’s case in storage for a few hours. We were due to fly to Brisbane later that day.

Lee-ann, thankfully, wasn’t too tired after her huge journey and I was utterly thrilled to have her there. During the day I would look at her and think, “wow, we’re in Australia together! How cool!” We went into the city centre, had some food, swapped family gossip and chilled out in Hype Park; Lee-ann entertained me with tales from her flight and doing imitating characters from ‘bo selecta’.

I felt guilty that I was making Lee-ann fly to Brisbane the same day she arrived in Oz but we booked our flights at different times but were lucky enough to get on the same ones. Also, the prices were crazy cheap so went for it. So, we flew to Brisbane no worries. Lee-ann got a tiny amount of shut-eye on the flight and I immersed myself in ‘rolling stone’ magazine. We asked a stewardess about the time difference towards the end of the flight and amended our watched and phones accordingly. I couldn’t put Lee-ann through the rigours of public transport in a city foreign to us both after her journey so we caught a cab to one of the YHA’s in the city. The cab driver, like so many I’ve encountered, asked me about English soccer teams once he knew where I was from, I wasn’t much help. Mind you, it took some persuading to convince him that I wasn’t Aussie; he didn’t believe me at first when I told him I was a pome.

The hostel was ok and we got ourselves a twin room. It was a tiny room but there was air-conditioning so we were ok. Needless to say we both slept heavily that night. We were up reasonably bright and early the next day, checking out the Museum of Brisbane and going round the shops and shopping malls. Lee-ann hunted in vain for some sunglasses and while we were in a tourist gift shop we were appalled but also entertained to find stuffed Cain toads on sale as ornaments and, more shockingly, severed kangaroo paws with bottle openers attached to them. Yuck!!!!!

That evening we decided to go to the movies to watch something trashy and Hollywood. We got a little lost in the maze like shopping centre where the cinema was situated but made it eventually and bought tickets for ‘jeepers creepers 2’. We checked our watches and realised that we should’ve been let into the screen, I looked around but there were no member of staff around to take our tickets. Afraid we were going to miss the start of the movie we made our way into the screen. We walked in to find the screen plunged into darkness and the movie on, d’oh! We walked down the aisle trying to find a seat but none were free and about ten seconds later I glanced up at the screen only to see the final credits roll! With a loud ‘d’oh!’ from me and much laughter from the both of us, we fled closely followed by the audience.

We had walked in on the end of the movie because the stewardess on the flight had given us the wrong time and our watches were half an hour ahead! My goodness, Lee-ann and I nearly wet our pants we were laughing so much! What fools! We calmed down, corrected our watches, cursed the stewardess and our own stupidity, and at the correct time made our way back to the screen. The movie, after all that, was pretty bad but entertaining nonetheless.