Day trip to Victor Harbour
It’s finally arrived. The President’s Day long weekend. Well, long for some because these days public holidays are only for the lucky few. To solve that problem, President J. Eager Howard announced that the public holiday would be scheduled on a Sunday, and decreed that Aussies shall all have the day off to go to our place of worshipping choice - church, mosque, pub - and celebrate Australia being the lucky country. I guess we were lucky that the winds after the reactor failure in outer Melbourne blew out to sea. Unlucky for New Zealand. But we should be lucky to have a Sunday off? My father still remembers the times when weekends ran for two days and long weekends three. I haven’t seen him for a while, since he won that free Reader’s Digest holiday.
So I thought I might take the scooter down to Victor. But this morning the radio reported that the city’s 38 million litre unleaded petrol storage facility at Birkenhead was empty and that some of Adelaide’s service stations were expected to run out of fuel today. The State Government and the RAA urged motorists not to panic into bulk buying fuel, but the queue must’ve been a kilometre long at the Hindley Street station, snaking all the way out onto West Terrace and causing all sorts of jams and scooter rage. Some wanker in an armoured-personnel carrier didn’t jump the queue, he just rolled right over the top of it. Lucky I saw him coming and pulled the scooter out of the way. Turns out it was a lady from Burnside, yes she had gold shoes on. Why do they keep buying these monster trucks when the world has run out of petrol? I think they must be sniffing it. She proceeded to fill ‘er up with the last of the petrol.
Anyway authorities assured us that by this afternoon a fuel tanker would dock in Adelaide, with another to arrive tomorrow, to fill the Birkenhead facility, which still only holds reserves for seven to 10 days.
So with that option gone I decided to go with the flow and take the only free transport on the road - the bus to Ikea. With the new expansion complete Ikea has taken over half of the airport site, what with the airline industry in tatters and flights reduced to a trickle after the recent fuel shortages. The only air traffic I noted was military - the refurbished Hercules aircrafts (most of them past retirement age of 75) taking troops northwards.
For lunch we had a picnic on the plastic grass of Ikea Square, with complementary Ikea vegetarian meatballs (although I’m sure they were trying out some of the new recycled paper ones) and then they kindly dropped us all back on North Terrace. All in all, it could have been worse.
