And I swore I was never going to do this again after Corsica...

Long long time readers will be familiar with one of the more ridiculous episodes of the Palunawack Tours across Europe last year.

Namely, the 'Screwing up the timetables and sleeping under a bush with an unstable French-woman' incident. Shortly followed by the 'Screwing up the timetables again and having to fend off thieves in Milan' incident the next night.

I swore (loudly) at the time that I would never ever again fail to read a timetable. As a result I was doomed to almost certain failure in this regard.



Last night my good friends, who have recently nicknamed me 'The Fist' for some unknown and slightly terrifying reason, arranged for us to and see Iron Man 2 at the cinema down in Knox. Knox, unfortunately, is nowhere near the train line I now use to get out of the city, so a 20 minutes ride was needed.

At least it would have been a 20 minute ride except that the guy organising the night had told me the film started half an hour before it actually did in a sneaky plot to get me to turn up on time for once. It says something to his knowledge of me that I was nearly late, even with the extra 30 minute head start and riding like a man possessed.

The show was being shown in Gold Class, which is a strange arrangement whereby you pay approximately twice the price of a normal ticket for the privilege of being able to buy overpriced food that gets served to you in the movie, and sit on extremely comfortable lounge chairs that can be adjusted by an electric switch. This gives the odd sensation that you're being approached by an electric car ever time someone decides to move during the movie.
Given my intense distrust of electric cars (I strongly suspect they're undercover spies for the oil industry) this was rather disconcerting.

Nonetheless the movie was awesome on many levels. Frankly I'd be happy to watch Robert Downey Jrn make witty comments for two hours about pretty much anything - as I mentioned to my brother the Thespian, I get the feeling he's not really acting at all, just being himself

Plus, there was lots of explosions. Any man that says big explosions with an awesome musical background isn't kinda fun to watch is a damned liar. (That's right, I said it)

So all finished well. As usual, I'd subconciously adopted the lead charecter's persona and was feeling pretty damn witty on the way out of the theater.

And then I realised that I'd screwed up.

See, the usual thing for me was to go out in the city and come back to the suburbs. Turns out that the other way around the trains stop earlier. Much earlier. So in addition to the 20 minute crawl back to Ringwood, uphill and against a head wind, I was now stranded.

Now I give Ringwood a lot of shit in this blog, by generally it's not too bad. But the train station, as with many suburban train stations in Australia, is not somewhere you want to be hanging out over night.

Which left me with the options of riding all the way back to the city (not going to happen), crashing under a bush (bloody stupid), or attempting to break into my parent's house without waking them up and scaring the living crap out of everyone in the building. Yay.

Have you ever noticed that when you really really need to be quiet, that's the exact time you fail to balance your bike properly, causing it to fall over in the driveway with possibly the loudest clang and ringing noise known to man?

I HEARBY SWEAR I WILL NEVER, EVER FAIL TO READ A TIMETABLE EVERY AGAIN.

Life remains interesting.

Gordon