We were forced to sleep in a shared dorm last night, with five strangers.
This is not good. We're not really up for that, and have been getting double or twin rooms everywhere else. In most of those we have to use a shared bathroom, so we are roughing it a bit.
Neither of us were pleased by having to share a room at the Airlie Beach YHA. A computer error meant that they couldn't tell us if a double was available when we booked, but they would put that down as the preference.
After stressing about it, and considering blowing fifty dollars on a room in another hostel, we got an OK night's sleep in the end. It still meant that we had no privacy, and when Anne fell asleep with her glasses on and her book open (as she always does) I had to sneak across the room in my pants (cue joke about there being room in my pants) to take her book from her and put her glasses in their case.
Someone had plugged their mobile in to a wall socket by my bed and left the phone on. I switched it off so I wasn't awoken by text messages in the night, though later wondered if they had set the alarm to wake them up. They should have kept it by their bed, shouldn't they.
Plus, Anne and I had been given "stinger suits" (thin wet-suit type things to wear while snorkelling) and if we'd had a private room we could have tried them on and looned around in them pretending to be space aliens or something. As it was we probably would have felt embarrassed doing this in front of the surly, anti-social people in our room, so didn't.
Not the way a couple in their late twenties should be travelling. We'll try to avoid that happening again.
Movies and books on the coach
We saw Rush Hour 2 on the coach from Rockhampton to Airlie Beach. It was really poor, made bearable only by Jackie Chan's fighting and stunts. Two stars (for the fights).
Snow Dogs starring Cuba Gooding Jr was on later in the journey, but we couldn't bring ourselves to watch that. Anne was immersed in the new Harry Potter book, and I was finishing off Nicholas Parsons's autobiography, The Straight Man: My Life In Comedy. I picked this up for two dollars (about 80p) in a "pre-loved" (second-hand) book shop in Hervey Bay. I got it as I liked the picture on the front as much as anything, but it was an interesting look at the entertainment industry in the second half of the last century. Its start pre-dates most of what I've read about comedy (i.e. Peter Cook and his ilk) and had some good insights. I now have the dubious claim to fame of knowing more about Nicholas Parsons than anyone I know. (I bet now that Colin will come up with loads of stuff I didn't know about him.)