Wednesday, November 09, 2005

St. George

I am attempting to arrange a voyage to St. George (some large number of hours and larger number of miles inland from Brisbane). It has taken me several weeks to discover where the town is, which I did on Monday. I mentioned the place to a travel agent here on that day and she had not heard of it and mumbled something about getting a bus maybe. So back to the internet and (after initially thinking that the only way to get there was by light aircraft for approaching AU$1000 - far too much unless I was very drunk during ticket-selling hours) I found a bus service that connects the town to Toowoomba which is almost Brisbane but not quite. Luckily there's a connecting service from Toowoomba to Brisbane on Greyhound. So to the travel agents again I went, and said "you will not have heard of St. George, but perhaps instead you can sell me a ticket to Toowoomba". "Indeed good sir," the girl replied, "we have not heard of St. George, but neither have we heard of Toowoomba". "Be so kind then as to bring up your computerised reservation system and type in these obscure location codes that I have prepared for you so that you can sell me a ticket that I could have brought off the internet for two dollars less had I not wanted to pay cash" (the experience rather reminded me of preparing all my flights for work using online reservation systems then printing the details, cancelling and submitting the information into my employer's Bureacracy so that the flights could be purchased at more expensive prices from their preferred vendors). She did, and so now I have ticket from here at 0400 on Friday morning, changing at Brisbane and arriving in Toowoomba around 0830. Now I must somehow arrange to get from Toowoomba to St. George - there is one bus that day, leaving Toowoomba at 1030 and arriving around 1600 at St. George, provided by a company that I found only after great difficulty (over an hour's Googling).

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