Monday May 11, 2009 - Touring Brissy and "planned" abseiling

Today I had plans to follow the walking tour in my Lonely Planet and take in some sights of the city.
Highlights of the tour include:

~ City Hall- where I took a ride up the original elevator up to the bell tower, then the lookout. The elevator stops where the clock faces are, so you can see the inside of the faces. I happened to be there right on the strike of the hour, so I saw the mechanisms moving that control the ringing of the bells. Then continued up to the lookout and got a nice view out over the city.

~ Several historic squares with statues from various different wars, the Shrine of Remembrance

~Several old historic buildings, including the Parliament house

~ The city botanic gardens

~South Bank Parklands and Streets beach: A cool area along the river with trees and grass and a whole long arbor covered walkway, as well as a man made sandy beach along the river. Including a cool Nepalese Pagoda. They held the World Expo in Brisbane in 1988, so a bunch of stuff was built for that, including the pagoda and a rainforest area in the park.

~ Had lunch at a little Italian place in the Parklands. I had been craving pasta, so I ordered a chicken pasta with cream sauce and a glass of white wine. The pasta was ok, not really what I expected or wanted, but I was starving so I scarfed the whole thing down. I decided I also wanted desert so I ordered a banana/Baileys crepe with ice cream. Now I was eating a late lunch and I had to catch the ferry to be at my abseiling by 3, but I still had some time before I had to catch the ferry at the pier on the other side of the river, so I figured I’d be ok. Of course the crepe took about 20 minutes to come out. I was waiting and waiting and waiting, kept looking at my watch, going, uh, I am running out of time people. I mean, what the hell took so long? Crepe’s take like 2 seconds to cook, I know, I’ve made them before. And the filling was some cream, bananas and some ice cream on the side. What about it takes 2o minutes? I’m still convinced the waitress either forgot to put the order in or the cook forgot to make it then went oh shit and put it on much later after I ordered it. I mean, how else do you explain taking 20 minutes to make a crepe…when there is TWO other tables with a total of 3 people in the whole damn restaurant. It’s not like the place was hopping. Maybe the lack of timeliness is why. I was starting to get really worried that I wouldn’t be able to make the ferry and contemplated just canceling the order and peace-ing out. Finally the crepe comes. Let me tell you, it was worth the wait. It was DELICIOUS (still shouldn’t have taken 20 minutes) but still delicious. I scarfed the whole thing down in about 2 seconds. Paid my bill then headed over the Victoria bridge to catch my ferry. I did make it with about 10 minutes to spare, but still, I was power walking to get there and I don’t like to cut myself too close, I’d always rather have too much than not enough time.

I hopped on the ferry and headed over to the stop to get off and head to my abseiling lesson. I got to Riverlife and presented my voucher. I started to fill out the indemnity form, so I couldn’t sue them if I killed myself. As I am filling it out, a guy comes out and says he has bad news. He tells me that the guy who is supposed to lead the lesson (I was the only one signed up by the way) was supposed to be there 30 minutes ago but alas is not. He goes into how this has never happened before and the employee will be dealt with accordingly, and that I can totally schedule to redo the abseiling any other day free of charge. And since I was already there I could have use of any of their other equipment. This included kayaks, bikes, rollerblades. Well I didn’t want to bike, I mean, I do that at home. I wasn’t really dressed for kayaking, but I didn’t know how to rollerblade. The guy who came to talk to me, Mark, said he’d give me a quick rollerblading lesson if I wanted to. I said sure, I mean, I could learn something new, plus he was totally hot! So why not spend some time with a hot guy? We chatted a bit, he is actually from Canada, with both his parents being from the States. He also plays ice hockey so we talked a bit about the playoffs, including my boys the Caps (this was when they were down 3-2 to the Pens). So then we headed out to teach me how to rollerblade. I was doing pretty well, not falling down too much. I even had a save where I was flailing all over the place, it was a sure fall but I somehow managed to get it together and stay on my feet. I think it is due to all those years of fighting as hard as possible to stay on the balance beam. That pretty much impressed Mark, he said it was the best save from a sure fall he’d ever seen. Yup, that’s right, I’m trying to impress a guy by not falling on my ass. Good plan I think. After a quick lesson on how to propel myself, turn and stop, I was off on my own to enjoy the blades and try not to fall on my ass. I did pretty well, I only fell twice and both times I fell forward like you are supposed to. One because I got distracted and ended up going of the concrete path onto the grass (insert laugh here) and once when I tried to stop. I was pretty tired, afterall I had been walking around all day so I headed back to Riverlife to turn in my skates and reschedule my abseiling. I got signed up for the next day at the same time, 3 pm (that’s the only time of day they offer abseiling). So I headed back off to the hotel to get some rest.
Tom and I popped down to another Italian place just down the street from the hotel to grab dinner to bring back to the hotel. Tom got spaghetti and I just ordered a salad since I had eaten a late and quite large lunch. We stayed in again and got another pay-per-view movie, “The House Bunny,” which I’d seen before but is a cute movie. So I watched it then drifted off to sleep.