MY HOLIDAY PLANNING HOLIDAY

It's a warmish day for the beginning of winter, so I thought I'd
finally take the opportunity to start up my 'bedroom laptop' which
only boots up when it's warm, to finally retreive the phlog post
I wrote on it while Aussies.space was offline:
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2023-02-23.1Talking_About_Talk.txt

I'd turned off my WiFi router and couldn't find my CF-PCMCIA
adapter when I finished writing it, so with the floppy drive
long dead and Aussies.space offline anyway, I left uploading for
(months) later.

Anyway I'm not in my bedroom now, but the sun room, because here's
the best place for both man and machine to keep warm on a
slightly-sunny winter's day. The bloke who eventually bought that
2017 Dell server I had (I figured by the time I found a use for it
the thing would be old and worthless like all my other servers
anyway) picked it up from in here. Compared to this 486 laptop with
8MB RAM, that thing had 14,000 times the amount of memory!

Ohh, all my NNTP bookmarks in Lynx on this laptop were set to
aioe.org, I'll have to go through and change them all now. Sed to
the rescue!

Well actually right now I was supposed to be on a train, or in
fact just arriving at Southern Cross Station in Melbourne. But
my trip to Barinsdale, as I proposed in my last post, turned out
to be mis-timed. After sorting out all the time-tables,
accomodation, and weather, it turned out that I'd missed the fact
that the train line from Melbourne to Bairnsdale was set to be
closed for about three weeks beginning tomorrow, so I'd get there
but then couldn't get back. Or I could, but on a bus, and I don't
like buses.

Anyway I realised that last weekend and still had time to sort out
another rail destination, so I wasted most of what should have been
a working Monday finding which other lines were open (it turns out
they're in and out of service all the time, all those years of me
successfully catching one into Melbourne annually must have been
a minor miracle!), and whether they went anywhere cheap yet
interesting. I settled on Kerang, up in the north of the state. Not
too big, yet with some stuff to see accessible by foot or bus, and
cheaper to stay at than Bairnsdale as it turns out.

But again after working out all the details and tripple checking
that all the train lines and stations were going to be operational,
even while I had the motel booking web page loaded, I got a call
that someone I'd met for a while on the weekend had come down with
COVID. So then I faced the risk that I would get sick with it up
at Kerang, which would be pretty horrible. So planning all that was
a waste of time too, and in the end I'm home again as usual (but so
far no sign of illness, at least).

I'm starting to think that I had the right idea before with
impulsive day trips by road, this pre-planning holidays idea is
a real pain. Well actually in my obsessive way I did quite enjoy
it. Checking through all the towns with working stations, checking
what's there, how much of that is within walking distance? Do the
opening hours fit with the train/bus timetables? How expensive is
accomodation? How many of those places are within walking distance
of the station?... Up to a point I really like all that.

In fact I made it extra hard by insisting that I wanted a room
with a bath, because I don't have one at home and over the years
a longing has been building for something more than my cheapo
shower unit connected to an unreliable house pressure pump can
provide. I had an idea that single bed rooms with a shower-bath
might exist, but they don't. Most motels are double-bed shower-only
zones. 'Baths' barely exist, but what you do have is a 'spa', often
actually in the bedroom part rather than the bathroom, and the
crowning glory of the establishment's very best available rooms.
For me then, trying to bath on the cheap, this requirement boiled
down to a shortlist of the best rooms at all the crummiest motels.
But that was fine, and in Kerang the difference wasn't even all
that big except compared to the pub which did have single rooms and
a shared bathroom (but didn't even mention this on their own
website for some reason) for $70/night, half what I was set to pay.

Actually the cheapest was $60/night for a single cabin at a caravan
park, and even the better cabins are surprisingly well priced, but
caravan parks of course tend to be out of town and a long way from
the railway station. Plus they remind me too much of my childhood
(like buses, actually).

Another observation is that there aren't as many public transport
services on weekends, which is when many of the attractions are
open, so it seems that the ideal is a trip that spans both weekdays
and at least a day of the weekend. So far it seems that buses are
especially unwilling to move on weekends, unless they're pretending
to be a train (which, it seems, they very often are).

In the end I've given up on it all for now. The reminder that the
pandemic isn't entirely behind me (I don't think I've actually
knowingly been a close-contact, or whatever they called it, before,
not that it carries any obligations anymore) has also got me
thinking about the risk of catching viruses on the train. So I've
concluded that planning my holiday, inexcusably digging into my
self-enforced work time to do so, is retospectively categorised as
actually being my holiday. Indeed most of it was kind-of fun, just
a couple of disappointments, and it sure was cheap! That will
also include writing this, which I've allowed to well and truely
overflow my lunch break now. I might still go for a drive on the
weekend and take some advantage of the weather to check out one
of the small reservoirs near the coast that I haven't got to yet.

 - The Free Thinker