Saturday, October 2, 2010

My crazy trip to the tropics!

Well what a full-on week it has been! For those of you who don't know, I work as a territory manager for a natural medicine company here in brisvegas and i have recently inherited North Queesland into my region. So this week was to be my first trip up to Townsville and Mackay. This is how it went:

I was told by Virgin Airlines on tuesday to arrive at the airport by 4.30am wednesday morning due to the backlog of delays that occured due to their computer malfunction over the weekend....that meant a 3.30am wake up grrrr. So i arrived right on time, no line-up, sweet as. Half an hour later there was an announcement, "We apologies for the inconvenience but we are experiencing a computer fuck-up glitch"....That meant that EVERYTHING had to be processed manually... So my 6am take-off turned into an 8am take-off.... 2hrs late, perfect way to start my day...  Then Hertz didn't have my hire car ready on arrival in Townsville...after a 15min wait i demanded politely asked for an upgrade...2hr 15mins late is not a good thing when you see clients by appointment!....

I got my upgrade - a Holden Optima Cox (quite heavy to drive, but had lots of power), oh and guess what? There was no MAP in the car! I was already running way too late to go buy one so i did my best to navigate my way around a town that i had never been to with a vague memory of it from street-directory.com that i had looked at the night before. After seeing the ocean i knew i was going in totally the wrong direction so i called my first client to ask for some directions, "Just go down the main road love, take a right at street 'x' and we are in the big shopping centre, you can't miss us!" ....Ummm do you how many MAIN ROADS there are in a town? And when you dont have a clue where you are to begin with makes it fun trying to find the 'main' one, sigh... I finally found the pharmacy.... by then my day was running 3hrs late...

Oh and i forgot to mention the car was BLACK.... Seriously, do you know what its like to drive a black car when it is 35 degrees C (95F) and a zillion percent humidity!? Fuckin gross, thats what its like, i had just about sweated off all my make-up by lunch time.

The day ended nicely with the most amazing seafood and dessert at The Watermark Restaurant. Thursday was hot and gross too, but i did manage to get in a beach walk and enjoyed more amazing seafood and dessert.. Fine dining is the only real perk of country trips... in my opinion.

So now we come to Friday.... The drive to Mackay...400km (249miles)... 4 1/2hrs of boring highway.. What makes the drive painstakingly worse are the following:
1. Cars hauling caravans
2. Slow drivers (those who drive at 20kph or more BELOW the speed limit!)
3. Douchebag drivers who don't know the meaning of OVERTAKE!
4. Slow Truck Drivers... They are even worse than slow car drivers, they just hold everyone up.

So as you can imagine i was becoming very irrate during various legs of my trip. Now picture this: Slow Truck driver in the lead, followed by 2 x Cars hauling caravans, followed by a Slow Douchebag Driver, then me....now thats a very LONG distance to overtake when you are number 5 in line on a one-lane highway... After what seemed like an eternity, i decided i had no choice but to overtake them ALL at once if i was to get to Mackay this year.... 145kph was pretty hair-raising for the few seconds it lasted! I made it to the front just in time before the Army Trucks heading north ran me over lol...... This scenario happened about 4 or 5 times....my life is never short of adventurous!

I made it to Mackay smack bang on time for my appointments.... Now the best part of Mackay was catching up with the gorgeous Selina for coffee!! That is one thing i love about this whole blogging experience - meeting amazing people whom have similar interests to you....  Hmmm, so are there any AMAZING, SINGLE, HEALTH & FITNESS GUYS in BRISBANE who BLOG?.... just putting it out there ;-)

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