So many dreams

I am on a train. This is not a terribly surprising thing as I have been on quite a few trains recently. This time however I am on a Queensland train, the Sunlander, but let us start at the beginning of the day. The day started with a slight disappointment. After getting up, at dawn again, and getting showered and dressed I went downstairs to find out that there had been a slight confusion about which type of membership card I had with the hotel chain and that my breakfast and meals weren't discounted after all. Oh dear. Oh well. C'est la vie. I must admit it did occur to me that it seemed awfully good deal for a free club thing. It's not as if I'm living hand to mouth, but I might have gone elsewhere for breakfast on intervening days if I had known. Still. That is life. So after having some breakfast there after all, because on check out days when you have a train to catch that morning there is not a lot of time for looking for alternatives, I went back up to the room, finished the last of my ablutions and the last of my packing and took my cases down in the quirky lift for the last time and checked out. A taxi was called to take me to the station, and it turned up pretty promptly. Being in a place in the main part of the city has its advantages. Wasn't too costly and beat dragging the cases all the way to the station all hollow. Found where the luggage check in was, and after a brief delay due to the need for them to get more Brisbane tags for the luggage I had my luggage checked in and was down the platform searching for my carriage.

I found the carriage without too much difficulty and settled in. As it turned out for the first half of the day, up until Townsville, I had the cabin all to myself. I did a bit of crochet, chatted a bit to some people, and went to the club car and saw the Adventures of Tintin movie. I liked the bits of it I did see, though it was a small screen and volume didn't always lift the dialogue over the cries of a nearby cranky toddler. I think I would like to see it again sometime in better surroundings. I also had some morning tea, (pikelets, jam and cream with a coffee) and some lunch.

Once we reached Townsville I got my new cabin mates. One is a relatively elderly woman who was visiting family for a birthday party, the other is a first year university student. The university student and I managed to talk for quite some time, since it turns out she is almost certainly from a family of SF fans. There are apparently many genre books in the home, and she was named after a Dr Who character. She has inherited some of the likes of her parents and there was some discussion about the recent Dr Who (though not this season as we both for different reasons haven't managed to see much yet) and books.

I may if I am lucky manage to persuade her to play ticket to ride with me on the train on my iPad. After that, the announcement that dinner was available was given and a bit after that I went to get some food. It's not the Indian Pacific (though if I had been organised and interested and got Queenslander Class it might have been closer) but the food is OK, and reasonably priced on the whole. So I am fed.

My older cabin mate has some new tech toys and was showing me some things, including some nice photographs, and in return I helped her with a couple of tips on getting around windows and reset the time on her machine for her. I've got my phone on charge and acting as a relay for my iPad so this will likely cost me a few cents since my normal quota for my month for my phone ran out a while back. I do mean cents though. I think it's 20 cents per MB so if I use it sparingly that should be fine. I may have to in Brisbane, or start frequenting HJs or Macdonalds as apparently my hotel there didn't say anything about wireless and the only note I have regarding internet for it is that the ethernet room internet is $24.95 per HOUR! Even if I could access that with an iPad I wouldn't.

Not much more to say so I shall finish there.