Monday 23 January 2017.
Sitting down to the familiar task of Travelogue tapping I'm glad I played it safe as far as the new laptop is concerned.
Having made my way safely to and through Brisbane Airport with almost enough time to catch the 5:37 AirTrain I did my best to adjust the body clock to a new concert-based paradigm and was only partly successful.
It was six-forty-five when, showered, refreshed and ready for action, I sat down to resume the Travelogue duties.
That's around two hours before regular operations start on a weekday in the Little House of Concrete, so the attempt, after a reasonable night's sleep, was at least partly successful.
A change in the flight time from Brisbane to Perth means I'll be up, about and headed to the airport around the same time tomorrow morning,. If I play things right I'll handle the late night post-concert bedtime and the time difference through the rest of the week after that.
But that remains to be seen.
What has become glaringly obvious is that the preceding exercises in dictation have spoiled The Author, whose hunt and peck keyboarding skills lag behind the thought processes by a considerable margin.
As far as speed of entry goes, it's Dictation first, daylight second, with Hunt and Peck not even on camera as the winner crosses the line. I reckon that last sentence took a good twenty seconds longer to complete than would have been the case otherwise.
And while there was nothing obvious that would have prevented a laptop purchased on Wednesday arriving on the doorstep in Bowen around lunchtime on Friday, there's no total guarantee that it would have panned out that way.
Given an alternative of around twenty-five days of hunt and peck, I'll take the safe option of collecting the new machine in Perth, thank you very much.
Even though I could have hit the road yesterday morning with the new machine all set up and ready to rock and roll.
After the concerns earlier in the week, once I'd stopped off at the auto teller to fill up the wallet, the run through to the airport, via Bunnings and The Fat Frog in Cannonvale was almost completely uneventful.
After a slight delay while we debated whether a thirty-metre hose was necessary (Madam prevailed, and we went for fifteen), my fish and chips at the Corpulent Amphibian meant I wouldn't be needing anything substantial in the evening.
Madam's fish taco would probably have left her indulging in a very light snack while she enjoyed quality Hughesy-free time with the tennis, LikLik and Ninja last night.
The only excitement came when I attempted to pair Madam's iPad to the car's communication system. My iPad, with its selection of Hughesy's Top 5000 most played, usually provides the soundtrack when we hit the road, but it was going south and Madam had acquired some Japanese ska that she thought would be good driving music.
But it helps to make sure that the musical content is on the device before you set about pairing the device to the car's Bluetooth.
I think I got the pairing right, anyway.
I was at the airport comfortably before check-in opened, which meant I was through security behind about half a dozen fellow travellers, well and truly in time to track down any available power points in the Departure Lounge.
Unfortunately, the only one in evidence was right outside the entrance to the Female toilet. Still, with a good hour and a quarter before boarding was scheduled to begin, I figured I could get both iPhone and iPad fully charged before we headed off.
According to TransLink, I was looking at around five hours with no way to recharge either device en route, so I figured I'd better get it done wherever the opportunity arose.
And if that opportunity involved sitting beside the door to the Ladies' convenience, that was tough luck.
But the aircraft had landed and the iPhone was showing itself at 97% when I unplugged the device. Plugging it back in revealed it was actually 100%, and, of course, may have been for some time.
Running the iPad through the car's USB meant it had suffered minimal rundown, so it remained untapped up as I removed myself to the regular seating to await the boarding call.
My place was immediately taken by a young girl of apparent Indian extraction, who joined the attractive possibly English lass who'd arrived to claim the other power point about half an hour earlier.
As I sat in the regular seating I resolved to investigate devices that will recharge three devices from a single power source, and an appointment with OfficeWorks has been added to the morning's To Do list.
And, at seven-forty, with breakfast atop the aforementioned list, one casts the eye back over fifty minutes of Hunt and Peck and wonders how much further one might have got with dictation.
Having temporarily discarded the cafe at the foot of the unit complex as a breakfast option, I took an extended wander around downtown Southport to scope out the options.
When nothing succeeded in catching the eye or capturing the fancy, I ended up more or less back where I started, having covered a tad over half a kilometre in the meantime (according to the iPhone's Health app). I'm sure it was more than that, though the discrepancy might be almost entirely illusionary.
And, as I sat down to await my coffee and breakfast wrap, I turned my attention to the news for the first time today.
The Astute Reader, will no doubt, have noticed the elephant in the room present throughout the foregoing account.
It's presence registered again as I opened the morning bulletin from the ABC News website.
There was, of course, a Springsteen concert in Perth last night, and I'd spent most of yesterday trying not to remind myself of the fact.
There's always a danger in seeing reviews and reports on concerts one could have attended.
That, actually, was the point of references to Neil Young shows in 2013. I'd opted not to go to Perth and Adelaide, caught Brisbane and Sydney, and then headed back to start on the Bruce shows when I could have gone on to Melbourne for the Plenary.
Wouldn't have got to Rod Laver, though.
The Springsteen-related logistics ruled that out, and there would probably have been a can't be in two places (Brisbane and Melbourne) factor as well.
The first four shows on the Neil tour, however, shared pretty close to the same set list (at least that's the way I recall it), and I'd caught that one twice.
I was sitting in Brisbane (IIRC) one or two nights out from Bruce, seeing the set list and thinking that I really could have been there for that one, and could still made it back for the show on the horizon.
So, yesterday, there were imponderables I didn't want to ponder.
Overnight, a FaceBook comment from the inimitable Staggster inquiring whether my itinerary included Canberra, had brought a regretful Not this time, which was produced an I understand.
Which was the reminder I needed to finally turn the attention to Springsteen-elated matters.
The BRUCEFanatic app is not completely up to date, but a glance at the official website revealed a twenty-four number show, with six more in the encore.
Started with New York Serenade, included Rosalita and Candy's Room, and skipped Waitin' on a Sunny Day with the seemingly obligatory haul a kid up out of the audience to sing a verse and chorus bit.
That has been a part of six out of seven shows to date. With luck, the absence will continue, though it does go down well with the audience.
But after a brief look, there's nothing there to cause regret at being too smart by half.
Because, having decided I was going, and going included Perth, things were, I thought, straightforward.
Arrive in Perth the day before the first show, stay there until the day before Adelaide, and then move on to Sydney and Melbourne the day before the first shows there.
In hindsight there's a gap in that logic you could drive a substantial vehicle through.
It works on the assumption that additional shows in each centre will come after the one announced in the original announcement.
That's the way it usually pans out.
So it seemed logical to get in early and book flights to Perth and Adelaide before tickets went on sale. Those cheap fares aren't refundable, so that part of things is reasonably close to set in concrete.
Accommodation is all no cancellation fee, provided it's more than twenty-four hours in advance.
And, with the sole exception of Perth, where you might not expect a third show to be added, that's the way it turned out.
So, with two shows in Perth selling out, adding a third meant it had to go earlier rather than later.
There's an awful lot of gear that needs to be shipped across the Nullarbor before Adelaide.
But, at the same time, on initial appearances, it looks like I haven't missed anything significant.
Assuming, that is, you can describe what was probably a rousing and stellar three-hour performance that included Candy's Room as insignificant.
And, at that point, with another three-quarters of an hour's tapping under the belt, one turns the attention to the day's important business.
Which includes that visit to OfficeWorks or its cousin brother.
As it turned out, the cousin brother got the nod. I'd noticed a new electronics store on the premises formerly occupied by Dick Smiths in my earlier wander through Australia Fair scoping out the breakfast options, and promptly found exactly what I was looking for.
The Critical Reader might suggest there was no need for four USB slots, but Madam is looking at an iPhone, and already has an iPad.
On that basis I reckon we can charge all the devices from one hub in one fell swoop.
From there, I took myself off to the Library, renewed the borrowing card that gives family members access to the in house broadband as well as reading matter (very important: they have significant Japanese language holdings) and headed back to sort out the details of a long dormant financial account.
After that, the original game plan involved the USB charger, but since that was already attended to I headed back to base. Once the packing (or, rather, repacking was complete, I killed time before lunch with a spot of reading.
A trip out to the Asian Supermarket delivered a tasty chicken curry, half a bottle of Crabtree Riesling washed it down, and once the washing up was done, I killed time till two, then manoeuvred the Coppertone Container around to the bus stop for an uneventful run through to Roma Street and the Hotel Jen.
Something along the way suggested that the night's accommodation was, at one stage, a Holiday Inn, and it may well have been. It has, however, been refurbished, and with a location right beside the Roma Street transit hub it's an ideal stopover for people in my situation.
A 9:15 flight and an inclination to be early means I'll be looking at the 6:27 AirTrain from Roma Street, which would have left Helensvale at five.
That, obviously, was not an option.
So the Hotel Jen slotted in ideally.
There's not much in the neighbourhood as far as eating and drinking options are concerned, but it's not that far to the CBD, and Nest, the onsite bar and restaurant fitted the bill very nicely.
By the time I was downstairs to check out the options, the only takeaways open were the ones I go out of my way to avoid. If there'd been somewhere doing pizza, I may well have grabbed a takeaway and a bottle of something from the Cellarbrations on the ground level.
Since I hadn't established the finer details of the takeaway options I took a look in there, found some interesting possibilities (both red and white) and headed on with plenty of options open.
If only they had been.
Since they weren't, I ventured into Nest, downed a schooner, ordered a pad Thai and washed it down with a quite acceptable St Helga Riesling.
While it wasn't the best pad Thai I've ever had, it certainly wasn't the worst, and the combination of Thai and Riesling worked charmingly, the way it usually does.
And, with. No thoughts of bottle shops and takeaways I was back upstairs shortly afterwards, pushing up Zs by a quarter to eight.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
The North Queensland wet season and other relevant factors.
Sunday 22 January 2017
And so we get to departure day with around 4300 words of Travelogue content done and dusted in an exercise that has achieved everything it set out to achieve.
We've sorted out the laptop issue, had 4000 words worth of practice, and successfully avoided pondering most of the imponderables one's thoughts turn towards when you've outlaid a substantial sum en concert tickets and airfares.
It's a situation where a realist might suspect that Murphy's Law good kick in big time. Murphy, of course, repeatedly stated that if something can go wrong it will; and when it does go wrong it will go wrong at the worst possible time.
There that there's Flannery's corollary to Murphy's law: Murphy was a bloody optimist.
Given the state of the world at large, there are any number of things that could go wrong, but there's no point in worrying about events on the global stage. The concerns of the average man in the street in downtown Bowen carry no weight in the corridors of global power.
And once we're on our way, any number of contingencies may arise; as they do, one counters them to the best of one's ability.
But the one thing that could have caused considerable preoccupation is getting to the point where one is actually on the way. That will come somewhere around 3:30, hopefully, after we've watched the aircraft land and taxi across the tarmac at Whitsunday Coast airport.
And that's item number two on the list of the things that could go wrong on Sunday the 22nd.
The first involves the possibility of not being able to get to the airport.
There is only one road between bold and Prosser Pine and only one road that I know of between Proserpine at the airport. The last bit of that road passes over the Goorganga Flats, a stretch of wetland that apparently sits on top of a substantial oil shale deposit.
That was the issue of significant ecological concerns a few years back and the notion of mining the deposit was knocked on the head.
Of course, if they had proceeded with the mine they would have been forced to relocate the airport. Possibly to a site north Proserpine on the way to Bowen.
Around the same time there were suggestions that the regions new airport should go in at Laguna Keys, a golf and residential development further south that actually lies within the boundaries of the city of Mackay rather than the region of Whitsunday.
But the airport remains where it was when Hughesy landed there on his way to Townsville back in 1963, on top of the wetlands that have been known to cut the highway, particularly at high tide when flood waters can't drain away.
There are several places between bold and Proserpine where the highway has been known to go underwater in a big wet season as well. So back around Thursday morning, with the long-range forecast suggesting thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon there was a cause for concern.
And, of course, it is the wet season.
If the monsoon trough decides to make its way south, The resulting deluge good The highway, and keep it cut for days. That's part and parcel of living in the nought.
So are those nasty little clockwise circulations around the centres of low pressure that we'll come to know as cyclones. While we love the rain, because a couple of cyclones guarantee a good wet, We can do without the disruptions to the highway thank you very much.
But, mercifully, circulation's have been absent through the first half of January and the highway south of Bowen looks clear for would-be travellers.
Today's forecast does refer to a possibility of the showers and or a thunderstorm so that could still be an issue.
That's why Hughesy will not be breathing totally easy until he sees that aircraft taxi up to the terminal.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I can't fly out until the aircraft I am going to board has landed. And aircraft can't land at Whitsunday coast unless the pilot can see the runway.
No instrument landings there, or across the water at Hamilton Island.
While one might expect the aircraft to land at Mackay with passengers transported onwards by bus, and, maybe, outbound passengers being bussed south join the flight, aircraft tend to turn around and head straight back to where they came from.
It's not something I've experienced myself, but I went within a whisker of it on the way back from the Springsteen concert in Sydney in 2013.
With the choice of a direct flight from Sydney to Hamilton Island or the two leg trip from Sydney to Brisbane to Whitsunday coast, I took the direct option which still worked out cheaper even with the ferry transfer from Hammo to the mainland included.
And, since I knew I was going to a three hour concert the night before the flight left with a choice of services on two airlines, I chose the one the departed later.
Just as well.
The other one, having departed around the time I was waking up in downtown Sydney got all the way up to the Whitsundays, encountered visibility issues, and flew all the way back.
The flight I was on also had its issues with seeing the runway, but managed to land.
It took me back to a Monday morning around forty one years earlier, when I was heading back to Palm Island after a weekend in Townsville. It had been raining all weekend, and when I joined several of my colleagues for the 7 o'clock flight everyone was very interested in the prospects. So we asked the pilot.
Don't know, was the response. Won't know until we get over there. Then, if we can see the strip, We can land. Questions about safety issues were greeted with a reassuring statement that the highest point of the island was around 3000 feet. So if we go up to 3500, our friendly flyer informed us, we probably won't bump into anything.
That's more or less the way it was.
We took off, flew straight into cloud, circled round sighting hilltops and such comfortably below us, found a clear approach to the runway and headed into land just as a squall came down the mountainside.
With that, the pilot lifted the nose and headed straight back to where we come from.
And, at around 9:40 in the morning, with a projected departure around 11:00, Hughesy heads off to complete the packing process with the narrative to be resumed somewhere between Bowen and Brisbane airport sometime between now and Tuesday morning.
And so we get to departure day with around 4300 words of Travelogue content done and dusted in an exercise that has achieved everything it set out to achieve.
We've sorted out the laptop issue, had 4000 words worth of practice, and successfully avoided pondering most of the imponderables one's thoughts turn towards when you've outlaid a substantial sum en concert tickets and airfares.
It's a situation where a realist might suspect that Murphy's Law good kick in big time. Murphy, of course, repeatedly stated that if something can go wrong it will; and when it does go wrong it will go wrong at the worst possible time.
There that there's Flannery's corollary to Murphy's law: Murphy was a bloody optimist.
Given the state of the world at large, there are any number of things that could go wrong, but there's no point in worrying about events on the global stage. The concerns of the average man in the street in downtown Bowen carry no weight in the corridors of global power.
And once we're on our way, any number of contingencies may arise; as they do, one counters them to the best of one's ability.
But the one thing that could have caused considerable preoccupation is getting to the point where one is actually on the way. That will come somewhere around 3:30, hopefully, after we've watched the aircraft land and taxi across the tarmac at Whitsunday Coast airport.
And that's item number two on the list of the things that could go wrong on Sunday the 22nd.
The first involves the possibility of not being able to get to the airport.
There is only one road between bold and Prosser Pine and only one road that I know of between Proserpine at the airport. The last bit of that road passes over the Goorganga Flats, a stretch of wetland that apparently sits on top of a substantial oil shale deposit.
That was the issue of significant ecological concerns a few years back and the notion of mining the deposit was knocked on the head.
Of course, if they had proceeded with the mine they would have been forced to relocate the airport. Possibly to a site north Proserpine on the way to Bowen.
Around the same time there were suggestions that the regions new airport should go in at Laguna Keys, a golf and residential development further south that actually lies within the boundaries of the city of Mackay rather than the region of Whitsunday.
But the airport remains where it was when Hughesy landed there on his way to Townsville back in 1963, on top of the wetlands that have been known to cut the highway, particularly at high tide when flood waters can't drain away.
There are several places between bold and Proserpine where the highway has been known to go underwater in a big wet season as well. So back around Thursday morning, with the long-range forecast suggesting thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon there was a cause for concern.
And, of course, it is the wet season.
If the monsoon trough decides to make its way south, The resulting deluge good The highway, and keep it cut for days. That's part and parcel of living in the nought.
So are those nasty little clockwise circulations around the centres of low pressure that we'll come to know as cyclones. While we love the rain, because a couple of cyclones guarantee a good wet, We can do without the disruptions to the highway thank you very much.
But, mercifully, circulation's have been absent through the first half of January and the highway south of Bowen looks clear for would-be travellers.
Today's forecast does refer to a possibility of the showers and or a thunderstorm so that could still be an issue.
That's why Hughesy will not be breathing totally easy until he sees that aircraft taxi up to the terminal.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I can't fly out until the aircraft I am going to board has landed. And aircraft can't land at Whitsunday coast unless the pilot can see the runway.
No instrument landings there, or across the water at Hamilton Island.
While one might expect the aircraft to land at Mackay with passengers transported onwards by bus, and, maybe, outbound passengers being bussed south join the flight, aircraft tend to turn around and head straight back to where they came from.
It's not something I've experienced myself, but I went within a whisker of it on the way back from the Springsteen concert in Sydney in 2013.
With the choice of a direct flight from Sydney to Hamilton Island or the two leg trip from Sydney to Brisbane to Whitsunday coast, I took the direct option which still worked out cheaper even with the ferry transfer from Hammo to the mainland included.
And, since I knew I was going to a three hour concert the night before the flight left with a choice of services on two airlines, I chose the one the departed later.
Just as well.
The other one, having departed around the time I was waking up in downtown Sydney got all the way up to the Whitsundays, encountered visibility issues, and flew all the way back.
The flight I was on also had its issues with seeing the runway, but managed to land.
It took me back to a Monday morning around forty one years earlier, when I was heading back to Palm Island after a weekend in Townsville. It had been raining all weekend, and when I joined several of my colleagues for the 7 o'clock flight everyone was very interested in the prospects. So we asked the pilot.
Don't know, was the response. Won't know until we get over there. Then, if we can see the strip, We can land. Questions about safety issues were greeted with a reassuring statement that the highest point of the island was around 3000 feet. So if we go up to 3500, our friendly flyer informed us, we probably won't bump into anything.
That's more or less the way it was.
We took off, flew straight into cloud, circled round sighting hilltops and such comfortably below us, found a clear approach to the runway and headed into land just as a squall came down the mountainside.
With that, the pilot lifted the nose and headed straight back to where we come from.
And, at around 9:40 in the morning, with a projected departure around 11:00, Hughesy heads off to complete the packing process with the narrative to be resumed somewhere between Bowen and Brisbane airport sometime between now and Tuesday morning.
Friday, January 20, 2017
Managing the adrenaline factor in the lead-up to Perth
Saturday 21 January 2016
There may be some who can sit down, cool, calm and collected, on the verge of an extended excursion but Hughesy is not one of them.
The itchy feet started on Wednesday, and at that point starting off on the blog entries seemed like a reasonable way of keeping the mind occupied.
I was also, of course, looking to verify that dictation was a viable option when it came to recording blog content.
But it wasn't.
The old laptop just didn't have the grunt to handle the task I'd assigned to it.
We fixed that by ordering a new machine at arranging to collect it in Perth. I suppose I could have started on the dictation on the desktop computer immediately afterwards, but I put it off until Thursday.
After all, I needed to do some research on wining and dining options in downtown Perth, where are the knowledge is sketchy and the multiplicity of choices intriguing.
By the end of the day, I heard enough likely candidates to cover lunch and dinner from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday morning.
Breakfast, I figure, is going to be closer to brunch the day after to Springsteen concerts.
So arriving on Tuesday afternoon and booking into the hotel, probably sometime around 2:45 will be followed by a brisk stroll to the Apple Store to collect the new laptop.
There are plenty of dinner options within a couple of blocks of the hotel, so once the new machine is set up and dinner has been negotiated that should be Tuesday done and dusted.
Wednesday is rest up before the show, a decent lunch and something at the venue and a start on the concert review once I'm back at the hotel.
The city of Fremantle at the mouth of the Swan River looks like an ideal candidate for the day between shows, and I should be able to spend much of the day at the Maritime Museum, the shipwrecked galleries and at the historic precinct in the port city.
Throw in lunch at the Fishermans Wharf and that should make for a good day out that will be a pleasant breather in between shows.
Friday is show day again, with a similar approach to Wednesday: a substantial lunch, concert and concert review.
And then, on Saturday there is a window for a lengthy ramble around Kings Park and possibly across to South Perth, lunch and dinner before Sunday's flight from Perth to Adelaide.
Sorting out that little lot kept the adrenaline under control through Wednesday.
Dictating what should have been Wednesdays blog content took a fair chunk out of Thursday morning, and the one-day cricket international (coincidentally played in Perth) looked after much of the afternoon and evening.
In between, I repeated the Perth exercise for the three night stop in Adelaide.
That wasn't quite the exhaustive process I'd employed the day before because I had a much better idea of what I was looking for, a slightly better grasp of the on the ground geography, two fewer nights to deal with and a late afternoon arrival.
So the Adelaide leg looks to be: arrival on Sunday evening, book in and eat; do the washing and the preconcert routine on Monday, and take a ramble around downtown Adelaide on Tuesday.
So there was Thursday's adrenaline the control exercise duly completed.
Friday morning saw more dictation and a lengthy discussion about the arrangements that would get Hughesy to the airport on Sunday.
Likely weather conditions had caused concern earlier in the piece, with showers and possible thunderstorm forecast for Sunday.
Throw in the start of the packing process, and a long look at the Melbourne restaurant scene and that was Fridays itchy feet syndrome comfortably tackled.
Which brings us up to today, around twenty-five hours before a likely departure from Bowen, lunch somewhere around Airlie Beach and check-in at Whitsunday Coast.
An early morning session in the garden, a light breakfast and the last of the packing will take care of Sunday morning so that only leaves the rest of Saturday.
We finished the dictation exercise just before 10:30, so that gives us about half an hour to start with the proper packing before the music show on Radio National at eleven.
Follow that by adding the final touches to the Numbers spreadsheet called Springsteen Tour 2017 and sort out the rest of the packing, and I should be right to watch the last two matches in the qualifying rounds of the Australian cricket's big–bash competition with dinner in the middle.
The critical reader will of course, by the stage be wondering why anyone is bothering to put this stuff down and the answer is quite simple.
The half hour or so spent dictating this detail has delivered just over 800 words of content with minimal use of the keyboard. So, the dictation thing is working.
I must say it delivers quite a buzz to be sitting here and watching the clearly enunciated the content appearing as if by magic on-screen.
Will be back to do it again tomorrow morning with a little exposition on local geography, the North Queensland wet season, and similar factors that could have thrown a spanner into the works.
They could still manage to do that, but tomorrow is forecast is 25 to 34 mostly sunny, partly cloudy with a slight chance of a shower developing aor a thunderstorm from the late afternoon.
So we'll see how it looks in the morning.
There may be some who can sit down, cool, calm and collected, on the verge of an extended excursion but Hughesy is not one of them.
The itchy feet started on Wednesday, and at that point starting off on the blog entries seemed like a reasonable way of keeping the mind occupied.
I was also, of course, looking to verify that dictation was a viable option when it came to recording blog content.
But it wasn't.
The old laptop just didn't have the grunt to handle the task I'd assigned to it.
We fixed that by ordering a new machine at arranging to collect it in Perth. I suppose I could have started on the dictation on the desktop computer immediately afterwards, but I put it off until Thursday.
After all, I needed to do some research on wining and dining options in downtown Perth, where are the knowledge is sketchy and the multiplicity of choices intriguing.
By the end of the day, I heard enough likely candidates to cover lunch and dinner from Tuesday afternoon until Sunday morning.
Breakfast, I figure, is going to be closer to brunch the day after to Springsteen concerts.
So arriving on Tuesday afternoon and booking into the hotel, probably sometime around 2:45 will be followed by a brisk stroll to the Apple Store to collect the new laptop.
There are plenty of dinner options within a couple of blocks of the hotel, so once the new machine is set up and dinner has been negotiated that should be Tuesday done and dusted.
Wednesday is rest up before the show, a decent lunch and something at the venue and a start on the concert review once I'm back at the hotel.
The city of Fremantle at the mouth of the Swan River looks like an ideal candidate for the day between shows, and I should be able to spend much of the day at the Maritime Museum, the shipwrecked galleries and at the historic precinct in the port city.
Throw in lunch at the Fishermans Wharf and that should make for a good day out that will be a pleasant breather in between shows.
Friday is show day again, with a similar approach to Wednesday: a substantial lunch, concert and concert review.
And then, on Saturday there is a window for a lengthy ramble around Kings Park and possibly across to South Perth, lunch and dinner before Sunday's flight from Perth to Adelaide.
Sorting out that little lot kept the adrenaline under control through Wednesday.
Dictating what should have been Wednesdays blog content took a fair chunk out of Thursday morning, and the one-day cricket international (coincidentally played in Perth) looked after much of the afternoon and evening.
In between, I repeated the Perth exercise for the three night stop in Adelaide.
That wasn't quite the exhaustive process I'd employed the day before because I had a much better idea of what I was looking for, a slightly better grasp of the on the ground geography, two fewer nights to deal with and a late afternoon arrival.
So the Adelaide leg looks to be: arrival on Sunday evening, book in and eat; do the washing and the preconcert routine on Monday, and take a ramble around downtown Adelaide on Tuesday.
So there was Thursday's adrenaline the control exercise duly completed.
Friday morning saw more dictation and a lengthy discussion about the arrangements that would get Hughesy to the airport on Sunday.
Likely weather conditions had caused concern earlier in the piece, with showers and possible thunderstorm forecast for Sunday.
Throw in the start of the packing process, and a long look at the Melbourne restaurant scene and that was Fridays itchy feet syndrome comfortably tackled.
Which brings us up to today, around twenty-five hours before a likely departure from Bowen, lunch somewhere around Airlie Beach and check-in at Whitsunday Coast.
An early morning session in the garden, a light breakfast and the last of the packing will take care of Sunday morning so that only leaves the rest of Saturday.
We finished the dictation exercise just before 10:30, so that gives us about half an hour to start with the proper packing before the music show on Radio National at eleven.
Follow that by adding the final touches to the Numbers spreadsheet called Springsteen Tour 2017 and sort out the rest of the packing, and I should be right to watch the last two matches in the qualifying rounds of the Australian cricket's big–bash competition with dinner in the middle.
The critical reader will of course, by the stage be wondering why anyone is bothering to put this stuff down and the answer is quite simple.
The half hour or so spent dictating this detail has delivered just over 800 words of content with minimal use of the keyboard. So, the dictation thing is working.
I must say it delivers quite a buzz to be sitting here and watching the clearly enunciated the content appearing as if by magic on-screen.
Will be back to do it again tomorrow morning with a little exposition on local geography, the North Queensland wet season, and similar factors that could have thrown a spanner into the works.
They could still manage to do that, but tomorrow is forecast is 25 to 34 mostly sunny, partly cloudy with a slight chance of a shower developing aor a thunderstorm from the late afternoon.
So we'll see how it looks in the morning.
Why nine? Part two: Hughesy's Springsteen background
Friday 20 January 2017
So we know, with nine shows in prospect but each night will be different. But we still haven't explained the need for nine.
This short explanation is that Hughesy's Bruce experience goes right back to the very early days.
I don't know when I heard Greetings From Asbury Park for the first time but I do know where I heard it how it was packaged.
The venue was the flat in Harold Street, Townsville, where I lived for most of 1972 and the album, came in a gatefold sleeve.
I suspect that it was an import copy sourced from the hi-fi shop in Townsville that dealt in such items. Alternatively, my flatmate, Mister Dave may have a laid his hands on a copy in one of the Brisbane stores that sold imports.
While gatefold sleeves were almost de rigeur overseas, Australian companies disliked ornate packaging and saved the fancy stuff for well-established artists.
I know Greetings arrived in a gatefold sleeve because I read, and marvelled at, the lyrics that covered the entire opened out inside.
They may even have seeped over onto the back sleeve, though I would need to go back and check on that minor detail.
I already knew of this Bruce Springsteen individual.
He was one of the pack of new Dylans who had emerged in the wake of the Bobster's motorcycle crash while he was holed up in the wilds of the Woodstock woodshedding with what we later came to know as The Band.
There were quite a few would-be or might-be new Dylans, and they weren't all enamoured of a label that seemed to be a handy catchall classification, an umbrella term that covered any singer-songwriter who delivered in his material with a folky twang.
John Sebastian may have been one of them, but he dated back to the Lovin' Spoonful.
Phil Ochs might have been considered another, but he was Dylan's contemporary and notional peer rather than his successor.
The new Dylans included John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, and various other individuals apart from this Springsteen character.
Looking at the fine print on the inner gate floor fold, it seemed Bruce delivered more than just vague traces of spinning reels of rhyme.
It was back in the days when I wore glasses but took them off to read.
These days, after cataract surgery, I need reading glasses, but if I had to go back to that densely packed inner gatefold, I'd be reaching for the special high magnification spectacles I keep for very fine print.
The album contained some striking material, and it was obviously the work of someone who was worth watching.
So I did. Not necessarily by buying, because buying without the full packaging just didn't make sense.
Recollections about the second album aren't quite as clear.
It reinforced the promise and added previously unnoticed rhythm and blues elements that had been there all along but hadn't pushed their way up into the forefront.
By that stage I was working on Palm Island, making regular trips back to Townsville on the weekends, returning to the palms with boxes of 90 minutes of Hitachi cassettes that had selections from my mates record collections carefully recorded, one album per side.
One of those cassettes had the first two Bruce albums, though it was soon apparent that I needed to buy copies because I needed the lyrics.
But at that point, Springsteen merely appeared to be a reasonably classy songwriter.
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle had given the distinct impression that here was a guy who'd started by passing himself off as a semi-folky singer-songwriter but was something of a rocker and was duly sneaking hs mates into a share of the action.
Students of Springsteen history know that by this point Bruce was hardly flavour of the month at his record company and that the third album, Born to Run, was going to be the make or break record.
It arrived with the wave of hype that raised question marks in itself, but those of us who were familiar with the earlier work were probably inclined to take it on trust.
Fortunately, it turned out to be completely trustworthy.
These days, something launched with the same fanfare would probably be taken with a shovel load rather than a pinch of salt.
But it was the mid-70s, and those of us who been around for a while were looking for something that delivered the same buzz we regularly arrived from hearing new things on the radio.
But it was a long time since weird heard anything that made you stop, sit up and take notice the way that, say, A Whiter Shade of Pale did.
Things may have been headed over the top when Bruce appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines, but those front covers had featured the likes of The Band in the past.
But not simultaneously.
I had an import copy of Born to Run by the end of 1975 and the content more than matched the advance publicity.
It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece that synthesised much of what had gone before, recognisable elements served up in a rock'n' roll gumbo with R&B seasoning by someone who knew what cooked.
And again students or Bruce history know what came next.
As Bruce began to break big, legal and contractual hassles kept him out of the recording studio.
They didn't stop them from writing or performing, but he couldn't record the new material.
And, having recruited a damn fine band, he needed to hold them together.
In other circumstances, the artist in question might place his backing musos on a retainer, the way the Dylan that did with The Hawks after the motorcycle crash.
The retainer gave them the wherewithal to transform themselves into The Band, and the whole process gave us The Basement Tapes and Music from Big Pink.
By the time The Band were releasing their second album, they were significant enough to the feature on the cover of Time magazine. And, possibly, on Newsweek.
But not in the same week.
No, if Bruce wanted to hold the E Street band together they had to work. So work they did.
In what it may have been one of the canniest career decisions a working musician has ever made they played marathon three hours shows, up and down Americas left and right posts coasts, many of them simultaneously broadcast in stereo on FM radio.
And where another performer might hold on to the newly written material, Springsteen slotted it into the set lists. After all, they seemed to be a strong possibility that stuff would never be recorded.
At least not officially recorded.
Several shows started with Springsteen exhorting the bootleggers to roll those tapes and Bruce has subsequently gone on to become arguably the most widely bootlegged artist in the recording industry's history.
By the time the court cases were settled, Springsteen had established a niche in the American concert to seeing that he continues to hold to this day. Not, perhaps, a position that slots him right into the mainstream but one that delivers marketability and the opportunity to sell out sizeable venues in significant population centres.
Having had the opportunity to road test new material the fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, consolidated all the gains he had made with Born to Run.
The consolidation continued through The River and Born in the USA while Bruce established himself as a performer who could sell out stadiums in the right markets.
And, all the while, his reputation as a dynamic live performer continued to grow.
As a regular consumer of whatever serious Rock music journals I could lay my hands on I read glowing accounts of epic E Street Band concert performances.
With no sign, and no apparent possibility, of a Springsteen tour Down Under, Australian journalist Stuart Coupe flew to Paris where he reported on a show that is alleged to have started with an acapella rendition of Elvis Presley's I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.
Except it didn't.
Not according to the BruceFanatic app, which suggests that particular song has never been performed live by Bruce.
On the other hand, a show on 19 April 1981 at the Palais de Sports in Paris opened with Presley's Follow That Dream, which fitted the never played before bit.
It was last played at the time of writing sixteen shows ago in Denmark on 20 July 2016 and has featured in the set list 48 times in between.
By that stage, we had a fan sitting in the wilds of North Queensland comfortably resigned to the notion that Bruce Springsteen live was not going to happen on Australian soil.
But, of course, it did.
By that time, however, I had relocated from Townsville to Bowen.
The tour covered major outdoor venues and probably hit Brisbane's QE2 in the middle of the week. Getting to the show would have involved at least two days off work. That's assuming I could fly from Townsville or Mackay to Brisbane on show day and back the day after.
In any case, regardless of timing and location, I had no way to obtain tickets.
So, Bruce down under 1985 was a fizzer as far as Your Humble Correspondent is concerned.
And despite the size of the venues he played, or maybe because of an inability to fill them, the tour was apparently a financial disaster.
The 1995 solo acoustic tour supporting The Ghost of Tom Joad album played smaller venues in school time with the Brisbane, probably, a one-off midweek gig.
Not much joy there for teachers in a relatively remote rural Australia.
Fast forward to Bruce's next appearance Down under, back with the band supporting The Rising album, and we have another Australian entrepreneur taking a financial bath.
So, for awhile, it seemed that was that.
Rumour in 2012 turned into fact in 2013 but managed to coincide with a tour by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I managed to catch Neil with the Horse in Brisbane and Sydney, then headed back north to do the same with Bruce.
That meant I passed on to Neil shows in Melbourne.
The second, at Rod Laver Arena, featured much the same set list Neil had played in Brisbane and Sydney, but the first, at the Plenary, a much smaller venue in the CBD delivered a set described as the greatest rock show ever seen on these shores.
And, quite possibly, the greatest Neil Young and Crazy Horse show ever. The Interested Reader can find the set list here.
I, of course, had missed it to catch Bruce, though Melbourne would have been doable if I'd wanted to make the to and fro extra effort.
But that was okay I'd seen Bruce, and I'd seen Neil, so that removed two significant items of the bucket list.
Better still, after the previous financial disasters, Bruce 2013 was lucrative enough to have a frontier touring back up the following year.
I looked at the tool itinerary, noted shows in Perth and Adelaide, and figured that the schedule would allow for second shows to be added in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
As it turned out, the second shows were initially slotted into Perth and Adelaide with a second show in Melbourne surreptitiously added and almost escaping my attention.
So, having returned from that excursion, I was not winding up the audience when I suggested over lunch at Food Freaks that next time I would be going to the lot.
The 2014 experience, however, underlined two significant factors.
The first was the realisation that multiple Bruce concerts were a perfect excuse for an extended stay in the city one might not otherwise be visiting.
Madam and I had four nights in Melbourne that tour and, barring one night when relentless doof doof from a nearby nightclub continued until almost four in the morning, Hughesy found it and enjoyable experience.
Mileages, however, varied.
Madam, having been to the first show, had passed on the second and found Hughes's desire to rest up for number two frustrating when there were places to go and things to do.
Which, of course, explains why this is excursion is being conducted solo and without supervision.
In conclusion, that why nine question can be answerted in a number succinct nutshells.
One. Because they are there.
Two. Because I'm a long time fan.
Three. Because I can. F
our. Because it's a perfect excuse to spend multiple lights in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Five. Because the same opportunity may not arise again.
Satisfied?
So we know, with nine shows in prospect but each night will be different. But we still haven't explained the need for nine.
This short explanation is that Hughesy's Bruce experience goes right back to the very early days.
I don't know when I heard Greetings From Asbury Park for the first time but I do know where I heard it how it was packaged.
The venue was the flat in Harold Street, Townsville, where I lived for most of 1972 and the album, came in a gatefold sleeve.
I suspect that it was an import copy sourced from the hi-fi shop in Townsville that dealt in such items. Alternatively, my flatmate, Mister Dave may have a laid his hands on a copy in one of the Brisbane stores that sold imports.
While gatefold sleeves were almost de rigeur overseas, Australian companies disliked ornate packaging and saved the fancy stuff for well-established artists.
I know Greetings arrived in a gatefold sleeve because I read, and marvelled at, the lyrics that covered the entire opened out inside.
They may even have seeped over onto the back sleeve, though I would need to go back and check on that minor detail.
I already knew of this Bruce Springsteen individual.
He was one of the pack of new Dylans who had emerged in the wake of the Bobster's motorcycle crash while he was holed up in the wilds of the Woodstock woodshedding with what we later came to know as The Band.
There were quite a few would-be or might-be new Dylans, and they weren't all enamoured of a label that seemed to be a handy catchall classification, an umbrella term that covered any singer-songwriter who delivered in his material with a folky twang.
John Sebastian may have been one of them, but he dated back to the Lovin' Spoonful.
Phil Ochs might have been considered another, but he was Dylan's contemporary and notional peer rather than his successor.
The new Dylans included John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, and various other individuals apart from this Springsteen character.
Looking at the fine print on the inner gate floor fold, it seemed Bruce delivered more than just vague traces of spinning reels of rhyme.
It was back in the days when I wore glasses but took them off to read.
These days, after cataract surgery, I need reading glasses, but if I had to go back to that densely packed inner gatefold, I'd be reaching for the special high magnification spectacles I keep for very fine print.
The album contained some striking material, and it was obviously the work of someone who was worth watching.
So I did. Not necessarily by buying, because buying without the full packaging just didn't make sense.
Recollections about the second album aren't quite as clear.
It reinforced the promise and added previously unnoticed rhythm and blues elements that had been there all along but hadn't pushed their way up into the forefront.
By that stage I was working on Palm Island, making regular trips back to Townsville on the weekends, returning to the palms with boxes of 90 minutes of Hitachi cassettes that had selections from my mates record collections carefully recorded, one album per side.
One of those cassettes had the first two Bruce albums, though it was soon apparent that I needed to buy copies because I needed the lyrics.
But at that point, Springsteen merely appeared to be a reasonably classy songwriter.
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle had given the distinct impression that here was a guy who'd started by passing himself off as a semi-folky singer-songwriter but was something of a rocker and was duly sneaking hs mates into a share of the action.
Students of Springsteen history know that by this point Bruce was hardly flavour of the month at his record company and that the third album, Born to Run, was going to be the make or break record.
It arrived with the wave of hype that raised question marks in itself, but those of us who were familiar with the earlier work were probably inclined to take it on trust.
Fortunately, it turned out to be completely trustworthy.
These days, something launched with the same fanfare would probably be taken with a shovel load rather than a pinch of salt.
But it was the mid-70s, and those of us who been around for a while were looking for something that delivered the same buzz we regularly arrived from hearing new things on the radio.
But it was a long time since weird heard anything that made you stop, sit up and take notice the way that, say, A Whiter Shade of Pale did.
Things may have been headed over the top when Bruce appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines, but those front covers had featured the likes of The Band in the past.
But not simultaneously.
I had an import copy of Born to Run by the end of 1975 and the content more than matched the advance publicity.
It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece that synthesised much of what had gone before, recognisable elements served up in a rock'n' roll gumbo with R&B seasoning by someone who knew what cooked.
And again students or Bruce history know what came next.
As Bruce began to break big, legal and contractual hassles kept him out of the recording studio.
They didn't stop them from writing or performing, but he couldn't record the new material.
And, having recruited a damn fine band, he needed to hold them together.
In other circumstances, the artist in question might place his backing musos on a retainer, the way the Dylan that did with The Hawks after the motorcycle crash.
The retainer gave them the wherewithal to transform themselves into The Band, and the whole process gave us The Basement Tapes and Music from Big Pink.
By the time The Band were releasing their second album, they were significant enough to the feature on the cover of Time magazine. And, possibly, on Newsweek.
But not in the same week.
No, if Bruce wanted to hold the E Street band together they had to work. So work they did.
In what it may have been one of the canniest career decisions a working musician has ever made they played marathon three hours shows, up and down Americas left and right posts coasts, many of them simultaneously broadcast in stereo on FM radio.
And where another performer might hold on to the newly written material, Springsteen slotted it into the set lists. After all, they seemed to be a strong possibility that stuff would never be recorded.
At least not officially recorded.
Several shows started with Springsteen exhorting the bootleggers to roll those tapes and Bruce has subsequently gone on to become arguably the most widely bootlegged artist in the recording industry's history.
By the time the court cases were settled, Springsteen had established a niche in the American concert to seeing that he continues to hold to this day. Not, perhaps, a position that slots him right into the mainstream but one that delivers marketability and the opportunity to sell out sizeable venues in significant population centres.
Having had the opportunity to road test new material the fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, consolidated all the gains he had made with Born to Run.
The consolidation continued through The River and Born in the USA while Bruce established himself as a performer who could sell out stadiums in the right markets.
And, all the while, his reputation as a dynamic live performer continued to grow.
As a regular consumer of whatever serious Rock music journals I could lay my hands on I read glowing accounts of epic E Street Band concert performances.
With no sign, and no apparent possibility, of a Springsteen tour Down Under, Australian journalist Stuart Coupe flew to Paris where he reported on a show that is alleged to have started with an acapella rendition of Elvis Presley's I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.
Except it didn't.
Not according to the BruceFanatic app, which suggests that particular song has never been performed live by Bruce.
On the other hand, a show on 19 April 1981 at the Palais de Sports in Paris opened with Presley's Follow That Dream, which fitted the never played before bit.
It was last played at the time of writing sixteen shows ago in Denmark on 20 July 2016 and has featured in the set list 48 times in between.
By that stage, we had a fan sitting in the wilds of North Queensland comfortably resigned to the notion that Bruce Springsteen live was not going to happen on Australian soil.
But, of course, it did.
By that time, however, I had relocated from Townsville to Bowen.
The tour covered major outdoor venues and probably hit Brisbane's QE2 in the middle of the week. Getting to the show would have involved at least two days off work. That's assuming I could fly from Townsville or Mackay to Brisbane on show day and back the day after.
In any case, regardless of timing and location, I had no way to obtain tickets.
So, Bruce down under 1985 was a fizzer as far as Your Humble Correspondent is concerned.
And despite the size of the venues he played, or maybe because of an inability to fill them, the tour was apparently a financial disaster.
The 1995 solo acoustic tour supporting The Ghost of Tom Joad album played smaller venues in school time with the Brisbane, probably, a one-off midweek gig.
Not much joy there for teachers in a relatively remote rural Australia.
Fast forward to Bruce's next appearance Down under, back with the band supporting The Rising album, and we have another Australian entrepreneur taking a financial bath.
So, for awhile, it seemed that was that.
Rumour in 2012 turned into fact in 2013 but managed to coincide with a tour by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I managed to catch Neil with the Horse in Brisbane and Sydney, then headed back north to do the same with Bruce.
That meant I passed on to Neil shows in Melbourne.
The second, at Rod Laver Arena, featured much the same set list Neil had played in Brisbane and Sydney, but the first, at the Plenary, a much smaller venue in the CBD delivered a set described as the greatest rock show ever seen on these shores.
And, quite possibly, the greatest Neil Young and Crazy Horse show ever. The Interested Reader can find the set list here.
I, of course, had missed it to catch Bruce, though Melbourne would have been doable if I'd wanted to make the to and fro extra effort.
But that was okay I'd seen Bruce, and I'd seen Neil, so that removed two significant items of the bucket list.
Better still, after the previous financial disasters, Bruce 2013 was lucrative enough to have a frontier touring back up the following year.
I looked at the tool itinerary, noted shows in Perth and Adelaide, and figured that the schedule would allow for second shows to be added in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
As it turned out, the second shows were initially slotted into Perth and Adelaide with a second show in Melbourne surreptitiously added and almost escaping my attention.
So, having returned from that excursion, I was not winding up the audience when I suggested over lunch at Food Freaks that next time I would be going to the lot.
The 2014 experience, however, underlined two significant factors.
The first was the realisation that multiple Bruce concerts were a perfect excuse for an extended stay in the city one might not otherwise be visiting.
Madam and I had four nights in Melbourne that tour and, barring one night when relentless doof doof from a nearby nightclub continued until almost four in the morning, Hughesy found it and enjoyable experience.
Mileages, however, varied.
Madam, having been to the first show, had passed on the second and found Hughes's desire to rest up for number two frustrating when there were places to go and things to do.
Which, of course, explains why this is excursion is being conducted solo and without supervision.
In conclusion, that why nine question can be answerted in a number succinct nutshells.
One. Because they are there.
Two. Because I'm a long time fan.
Three. Because I can. F
our. Because it's a perfect excuse to spend multiple lights in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Five. Because the same opportunity may not arise again.
Satisfied?
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Springsteen 2017: The Beginnings
Thursday 19 January 2016
The Critical Reader may be inclined to debate whether we need to start a Travelogue some three and a bit days out from the actual border departure, but it was nearly four and a bit.
I spent yesterday's morning walk mapping out an elegant four-episode exposition about matters relating to Hughesy's Springsteen-chasing excursion.
Something that would lead elegantly into the day by day detail that will kick in when I head off to Brisbane Airport for the transcontinental flight on Tuesday.
And I sat down to start it off yesterday morning to intending to kill two birds with one stone.
It wasn't just about the Travelogue.
I needed to check whether the laptop we bought before our previous trip to Perth some six and a half years ago had the capacity to handle when I was about to ask to do.
Madam, who'd been using it for much of the meantime, had her doubts but I was hopeful that I could use a limited set of software on the not quite decrepit machine.
The plan was to use Hughesy's Christmas present, a headset and microphone of the type familiar to switchboard operators and the like to dictate Travelogue content straight into Pages on the laptop.
You can, after all, speak almost as fast as you can think and you do it much more quickly than a hunt and peck typist can type.
Dictation seems the way to go, but dictating into a word processor requires a set of skills that need to be established, developed and practised.
So yesterday's exercise was aimed to determine the capabilities and start to hone the skills.
But it didn't happen.
It was soon apparent the laptop lacked the microprocessor grunt and the RAM capacity to run Pages with the latest version of Mac OS.
We've fixed that.
A phone call to the Apple Store means a shiny new MacBook Air is waiting for me when I get to Perth on Tuesday afternoon.
In the meantime, the skill development factor remains, and things nutted out on two mornings' walk will provide the content.
So, here we go.
I'm off, over the next month, on a road trip that will encompass nine Bruce Springsteen concerts in five cities.
It's something I never expected to happen, but, then again, you never know.
The campaign, if the campaign is the right word for moving towards setting up something you regard as extremely unlikely, began at the end of February 2014.
If I remember things correctly the final concert of the Australian leg of Springsteen's Tour Down Under was followed by a return to the north of the following morning.
My calendar app tells me I was home on Thursday, 27 February, having attended four shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Since Friday follows Thursday the same way as blood that follows a punch on the nose, and that particular Friday was the last day of the month we would have been heading off to the Old Retired Teachers' (ORTs) lunch.
I don't recall whether we met at the end of January, but everyone knew I had been away and why I have been away.
We had the predictable questions about the experience.
Two of those present were bemused by the fact that their son and daughter-in-law had flown from Townsville to Sydney, rented a car and taken themselves to the Springsteen concert in the Hunter Valley the previous Saturday.
Son and daughter-in-law are both teachers, and the Brisbane show would have entailed two days off work and associated issues.
Hughesy, of course, is retired, and known to do things like fly to Japan for four Elvis Costello concerts. I had also been to a bracket of five Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen concerts the year before.
So you could say I had form.
The predictable question was whether these extravagances we justified.
My response should come as no surprise.
Wednesday's concert, which had started with a Bee Gees cover (Staying Alive) was being rated in knowledgeable circles it Is possibly one of the best Springsteen concerts ever.
That's a big call, and I was still on a significant adrenaline high.
My response would have been that it was definitely worth it and that next time, come hell or high water, I was going to the lot.
The hell or high water may not have been explicitly stated, but was definitely implied.
And if that meant flying across the clock to Perth I would be flying across the Continent to Perth.
There was, I pointed out, an additional factor. Springsteen is a big enough name to sell it out reasonably sized venues in a capital city for more than one night.
I had just come back from a tour that had included two concerts in Perth, two in Adelaide, two in Melbourne and one in each of Sydney, Brisbane, Hanging Rock and the Hunter Valley.
Springsteen 's legendary three to three-and-a-half hour shows make it unlikely he will backup on successive nights.
Spring chickens might, but Bruce is no spring chicken, and while he's on stage, believe me, he works.
On that basis, a Springsteen tour with the possibility of two shows in most of Australia's capital cities meant a seemingly obsessive fan might be forced to spend four or five nights in Perth, and the same in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
That was an exciting prospect.
Not that I thought it was ever going to happen.
Bruce wasn't the back out here in 2015, and by 2016 the Australian dollars all against the greenback suggested future Springsteen tours were a dubious prospect. I figured Bruce's asking price, at an exchange rate well below parity, would have would-be promoters heading for the door.
September 2016, however, saw, first, rumours, and then the confirmation of an Australian tour at the start of 2016.
Once it was definite (I kept the speculation to myself) I took the news down to the other end of the Little House of Concrete expecting this would be the start of the proverbial protracted negotiations.
The somewhat surprising reaction from The Supervisor was "So, of course, you're going".
That conclusion was hard to argue with, and pretty much right on the money.
A glance at the tour itinerary revealed windows for second shows in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane so I said about booking accommodation and the flights that would get me back and forth across the Nullarbor.
Tickets for the initial round of shows went on sale, were duly purchased, and Hughesy sat down to wait for news of seconds. The next tranche included second shows in Perth and Brisbane, while a third added seconds to Sydney and Melbourne and a new show in the West.
At that point, some of the logic code unstuck since the new show in Perth would it be happening while I was making my way from Bowen to Brisbane.
But you can't have everything, and it's unreasonable to expect it.
Nine shows will have to do.
But why nine?
The answer to that question is two-pronged and double jointed.
First, every three hour Springsteen extravaganza is different. These days, Bruce never sets out to play the same show twice, and if it did happen to occur, it would have happened by accident or circumstantial coincidence rather than intent.
And not be on successive nights. Not even close.
The song matrix I use to remind me of what I've experienced at the seven Springsteen shows to date contains a tad under 190 performances spread around more than ninety separate entries.
Remarkably, comfortably more than half of those entries have a single performance beside them.
If that sounds a little vague, it depends on whether you count a full band rendition of Thunder Road or The Promised Land alongside a solo acoustic version (or vice versa).
And, with the word count heading past 1200 words, that's an appropriate point to knock this particular dictation exercise on the head.
Coming up:
Why nine? Part Two: Hughesy's Springsteen background.
Managing the adrenaline factor in the lead-up to Perth.
The North Queensland wet season and other relevant factors.
Getting there: Brisbane.
Getting there: Perth.
And, from there, day by day detail and nine concert reviews. Stay tuned.
The Critical Reader may be inclined to debate whether we need to start a Travelogue some three and a bit days out from the actual border departure, but it was nearly four and a bit.
I spent yesterday's morning walk mapping out an elegant four-episode exposition about matters relating to Hughesy's Springsteen-chasing excursion.
Something that would lead elegantly into the day by day detail that will kick in when I head off to Brisbane Airport for the transcontinental flight on Tuesday.
And I sat down to start it off yesterday morning to intending to kill two birds with one stone.
It wasn't just about the Travelogue.
I needed to check whether the laptop we bought before our previous trip to Perth some six and a half years ago had the capacity to handle when I was about to ask to do.
Madam, who'd been using it for much of the meantime, had her doubts but I was hopeful that I could use a limited set of software on the not quite decrepit machine.
The plan was to use Hughesy's Christmas present, a headset and microphone of the type familiar to switchboard operators and the like to dictate Travelogue content straight into Pages on the laptop.
You can, after all, speak almost as fast as you can think and you do it much more quickly than a hunt and peck typist can type.
Dictation seems the way to go, but dictating into a word processor requires a set of skills that need to be established, developed and practised.
So yesterday's exercise was aimed to determine the capabilities and start to hone the skills.
But it didn't happen.
It was soon apparent the laptop lacked the microprocessor grunt and the RAM capacity to run Pages with the latest version of Mac OS.
We've fixed that.
A phone call to the Apple Store means a shiny new MacBook Air is waiting for me when I get to Perth on Tuesday afternoon.
In the meantime, the skill development factor remains, and things nutted out on two mornings' walk will provide the content.
So, here we go.
I'm off, over the next month, on a road trip that will encompass nine Bruce Springsteen concerts in five cities.
It's something I never expected to happen, but, then again, you never know.
The campaign, if the campaign is the right word for moving towards setting up something you regard as extremely unlikely, began at the end of February 2014.
If I remember things correctly the final concert of the Australian leg of Springsteen's Tour Down Under was followed by a return to the north of the following morning.
My calendar app tells me I was home on Thursday, 27 February, having attended four shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Since Friday follows Thursday the same way as blood that follows a punch on the nose, and that particular Friday was the last day of the month we would have been heading off to the Old Retired Teachers' (ORTs) lunch.
I don't recall whether we met at the end of January, but everyone knew I had been away and why I have been away.
We had the predictable questions about the experience.
Two of those present were bemused by the fact that their son and daughter-in-law had flown from Townsville to Sydney, rented a car and taken themselves to the Springsteen concert in the Hunter Valley the previous Saturday.
Son and daughter-in-law are both teachers, and the Brisbane show would have entailed two days off work and associated issues.
Hughesy, of course, is retired, and known to do things like fly to Japan for four Elvis Costello concerts. I had also been to a bracket of five Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen concerts the year before.
So you could say I had form.
The predictable question was whether these extravagances we justified.
My response should come as no surprise.
Wednesday's concert, which had started with a Bee Gees cover (Staying Alive) was being rated in knowledgeable circles it Is possibly one of the best Springsteen concerts ever.
That's a big call, and I was still on a significant adrenaline high.
My response would have been that it was definitely worth it and that next time, come hell or high water, I was going to the lot.
The hell or high water may not have been explicitly stated, but was definitely implied.
And if that meant flying across the clock to Perth I would be flying across the Continent to Perth.
There was, I pointed out, an additional factor. Springsteen is a big enough name to sell it out reasonably sized venues in a capital city for more than one night.
I had just come back from a tour that had included two concerts in Perth, two in Adelaide, two in Melbourne and one in each of Sydney, Brisbane, Hanging Rock and the Hunter Valley.
Springsteen 's legendary three to three-and-a-half hour shows make it unlikely he will backup on successive nights.
Spring chickens might, but Bruce is no spring chicken, and while he's on stage, believe me, he works.
On that basis, a Springsteen tour with the possibility of two shows in most of Australia's capital cities meant a seemingly obsessive fan might be forced to spend four or five nights in Perth, and the same in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
That was an exciting prospect.
Not that I thought it was ever going to happen.
Bruce wasn't the back out here in 2015, and by 2016 the Australian dollars all against the greenback suggested future Springsteen tours were a dubious prospect. I figured Bruce's asking price, at an exchange rate well below parity, would have would-be promoters heading for the door.
September 2016, however, saw, first, rumours, and then the confirmation of an Australian tour at the start of 2016.
Once it was definite (I kept the speculation to myself) I took the news down to the other end of the Little House of Concrete expecting this would be the start of the proverbial protracted negotiations.
The somewhat surprising reaction from The Supervisor was "So, of course, you're going".
That conclusion was hard to argue with, and pretty much right on the money.
A glance at the tour itinerary revealed windows for second shows in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane so I said about booking accommodation and the flights that would get me back and forth across the Nullarbor.
Tickets for the initial round of shows went on sale, were duly purchased, and Hughesy sat down to wait for news of seconds. The next tranche included second shows in Perth and Brisbane, while a third added seconds to Sydney and Melbourne and a new show in the West.
At that point, some of the logic code unstuck since the new show in Perth would it be happening while I was making my way from Bowen to Brisbane.
But you can't have everything, and it's unreasonable to expect it.
Nine shows will have to do.
But why nine?
The answer to that question is two-pronged and double jointed.
First, every three hour Springsteen extravaganza is different. These days, Bruce never sets out to play the same show twice, and if it did happen to occur, it would have happened by accident or circumstantial coincidence rather than intent.
And not be on successive nights. Not even close.
The song matrix I use to remind me of what I've experienced at the seven Springsteen shows to date contains a tad under 190 performances spread around more than ninety separate entries.
Remarkably, comfortably more than half of those entries have a single performance beside them.
If that sounds a little vague, it depends on whether you count a full band rendition of Thunder Road or The Promised Land alongside a solo acoustic version (or vice versa).
And, with the word count heading past 1200 words, that's an appropriate point to knock this particular dictation exercise on the head.
Coming up:
Why nine? Part Two: Hughesy's Springsteen background.
Managing the adrenaline factor in the lead-up to Perth.
The North Queensland wet season and other relevant factors.
Getting there: Brisbane.
Getting there: Perth.
And, from there, day by day detail and nine concert reviews. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
So, it's been a while...
Given the time gap between November 2013 and January 2017 one might be inclined to suspect that Hughesy the Author had bundled this whole travelogue exercise into the too hard basket.
Or, possibly, after the 2013 trip to Japan we stopped going places.
The first suspicion is true, the second demonstrably false.
Writing up Japan 2013 ended up being easiest done in Pages and iBooks Author.
The result appears in the latest incarnation of my iBook Over the Horizon: On the Road in Japan.
That's the December 2013 trip, available as an iBook or a PDF.
Right underneath it there's another offering with an account of a subsequent trip to Japan in October 2015.
And, now that I look at it, I see I need to update the other pages in the Travelogue section of Hughesy's iBooks to cover trips to Europe, Southeast Asia, and the wilds of the Gulf Savannah.
Much of the content is not suited to this travel blog, which operates best as a day by day, what I did and where I went exercise with minimal background research and not too much in the way of historical explanation.
Get diverted into historical and other whys and wherefores and, before you know it you're way behind anything resembling a timely blogging schedule, with a backlog that keeps increasing.
Which is, more or less, the way it happened.
So, I've been busy on other things.
But here I am at the end of January 2017, about to head off on an almost month-long jaunt around Australia chasing Bruce Springsteen concerts.
That looks like something which should work in the blog environment, so let's try it.
Coming up: Springsteen 2017: The Beginnings.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Japan 2013: Bowen > Cairns
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
Practice, they say, makes perfect, and we've probably had enough practice to get most things right when it comes to heading off for a week or two.
There are, of course, issues, many of them relating to two furry felines who are deprived of their regular indoor comforts when we head off, and tend to display a degree of resentful disdain when we return. On this occasion, we've enlisted the help of a feline friendly volunteer and expect to return to find LikLik and Ninja are much more welcoming of strangers, having been feted with food and an appreciation of feline sensitivities over a period of just over a fortnight.
Or maybe not, but we did try.
On previous trips away we've questioned whether the hot plate on the stove has been turned off, had Hughesy fail to switch off the air-con before the cheap tariff down time kicked in, and have been known to make the odd U-turn just to make sure whatever concern has just been raised has, in fact, been addressed.
Each time we do that, of course, we find another thing to add to the pre-departure checklist, and repeated practice has delivered a routine that should ensure all eventualities have been covered.
That was the way it seemed, anyway. Both of us threw in minor suggestions that were met with a checked that from the other side, and it gave us something to do on a two hundred kilometre leg that has been done so often that there's practically nothing short of a major disaster that would provide anything out of the ordinary to remark on.
And we don't want major disasters, do we?
That doesn't mean there's nothing in the pipeline as far as things to comment on are concerned.
As usual we hit the shortcut just south of Ayr, where I was again foiled in my desire to have us pull over so I can get a photo of the sign advertising an entity called Ayr Boring Company.
When I've got the image I've got the caption (The conversation's not that much better on the other side of the river either) to go with it.
The short cut isn't that much shorter, but avoids traffic issues in downtown Ayr, and for the past year or so has delivered the added advantage of avoiding much of the road work going on to the north of Brandon.
For a good year before that it skirted past roadworks to the south of Brandon as well.
Those concerns delivered what amounted to a trouble free run from Bowen through Townsville.
We got a chance to liven things up with a momentary panic when Hughesy's reading glasses went missing after we'd checked the air pressure in the tyres at the Servo near the Townsville race course, but that resolved itself when they dropped out of my shirt.
We took the ring road after refuelling, and were crossing Ross River shortly after ten thirty, having left Bowen just before seven forty-five.
It was, as indicated, a clear run through, with a minor delay at the roadworks just north of Brandon, and things continued in the same vein as we headed towards Ingham.
We identified the scene of the accident that could have been infinitely worse on the last trip to Cairns, sailed through Ingham and over the Cardwell Range and were pulling up outside the Vivia Cafe in Cardwell shortly after twelve fifteen.
The Vivia has been the standard stop in Cardwell for a while now, and that's not likely to change after a minor incident last time we were passing that way. Somewhat shaken by the accident we'd just been involved with, I'd failed to notice my mobile drop out of the lap when we pulled up in Cardwell.
It ended up in the gutter, where the management of the Vivia had found and held onto it.
Next morning, not realising what had happened, we tried the usual trick when you can't locate the mobile.
Call it and wait for the ring tone.
That didn't work, because we were in Mission Beach and the phone was in Cardwell.
The attempt resulted in a call back from Cardwell. When we got home I found a message on the answering machine as well.
So we got the phone back, and the very least we can do in the way of thanks is to call in for a meal when we're passing. This time the meal amounted to a Tex wrap for Hughesy, crab sangas for Madam, and a couple of coffees.
We were back on the road before one, having bought the loop that will hold the reading glasses around the neck, and preventing a repetition of the servo incident in Townsville on the way up.
On the leg between Cardwell and Cairns the only item of note was the discovery that Hughesy's new iPad, with WiFi rather than 3G technology, lacks GPS capability, which is a pity since I was looking at it as a navigation aid in Japan.
We might still be able to use it in cases where we've got access to WiFi along the way, but the lack of the helpful blue dot indicating your actual GPS-located position limits the value as a navigational aid, and on that basis it looks like the old model will still be in use when we're travelling in Oz.
There were a couple of minor delays on the highway north of Tully, and we found ourselves rolling into the main conurbation at Cairns just after three.
With nothing on the agenda apart from checking into the accommodation at Bay Village Tropical Retreat, we made a booking for the restaurant at seven and eventually managed to squeeze The Possum into the parking space.
You'd reckon it should be easier to get it out again in the morning, but these predictions seem to have a habit of coming unstuck.
With five hours' complimentary WiFi, we settled down to read email, checked the odd link out of there, and, having passed that particular baton over to Madam I set about jotting down the start of the Travelogue.
The complimentary WiFi came with a few quirks that seemed to prevent two devices accessing the came connection simultaneously, so a tag team approach seemed the way to go.
In any case, after the drive Madam wanted a rest before engaging in brain-related activity.
We wandered through to the Balinese restaurant on the premises that had been the motivation for making the hotel reservation, and while dinner wasn't as gobsmackingly scrumptious as it was the previous time one suspects that might have something to do with the fact there were just the two of us this time around.
Our previous visit had The Sister and The Rowdy Niece with us and was, therefore, a matter of four shared dishes between us rather than the one each thin time around.
But the food was good, the service attentive and the Mitchell Watervale Riesling the way it usually is, so Hughesy went to bed a happy camper.
Practice, they say, makes perfect, and we've probably had enough practice to get most things right when it comes to heading off for a week or two.
There are, of course, issues, many of them relating to two furry felines who are deprived of their regular indoor comforts when we head off, and tend to display a degree of resentful disdain when we return. On this occasion, we've enlisted the help of a feline friendly volunteer and expect to return to find LikLik and Ninja are much more welcoming of strangers, having been feted with food and an appreciation of feline sensitivities over a period of just over a fortnight.
Or maybe not, but we did try.
On previous trips away we've questioned whether the hot plate on the stove has been turned off, had Hughesy fail to switch off the air-con before the cheap tariff down time kicked in, and have been known to make the odd U-turn just to make sure whatever concern has just been raised has, in fact, been addressed.
Each time we do that, of course, we find another thing to add to the pre-departure checklist, and repeated practice has delivered a routine that should ensure all eventualities have been covered.
That was the way it seemed, anyway. Both of us threw in minor suggestions that were met with a checked that from the other side, and it gave us something to do on a two hundred kilometre leg that has been done so often that there's practically nothing short of a major disaster that would provide anything out of the ordinary to remark on.
And we don't want major disasters, do we?
That doesn't mean there's nothing in the pipeline as far as things to comment on are concerned.
As usual we hit the shortcut just south of Ayr, where I was again foiled in my desire to have us pull over so I can get a photo of the sign advertising an entity called Ayr Boring Company.
When I've got the image I've got the caption (The conversation's not that much better on the other side of the river either) to go with it.
The short cut isn't that much shorter, but avoids traffic issues in downtown Ayr, and for the past year or so has delivered the added advantage of avoiding much of the road work going on to the north of Brandon.
For a good year before that it skirted past roadworks to the south of Brandon as well.
Those concerns delivered what amounted to a trouble free run from Bowen through Townsville.
We got a chance to liven things up with a momentary panic when Hughesy's reading glasses went missing after we'd checked the air pressure in the tyres at the Servo near the Townsville race course, but that resolved itself when they dropped out of my shirt.
We took the ring road after refuelling, and were crossing Ross River shortly after ten thirty, having left Bowen just before seven forty-five.
It was, as indicated, a clear run through, with a minor delay at the roadworks just north of Brandon, and things continued in the same vein as we headed towards Ingham.
We identified the scene of the accident that could have been infinitely worse on the last trip to Cairns, sailed through Ingham and over the Cardwell Range and were pulling up outside the Vivia Cafe in Cardwell shortly after twelve fifteen.
The Vivia has been the standard stop in Cardwell for a while now, and that's not likely to change after a minor incident last time we were passing that way. Somewhat shaken by the accident we'd just been involved with, I'd failed to notice my mobile drop out of the lap when we pulled up in Cardwell.
It ended up in the gutter, where the management of the Vivia had found and held onto it.
Next morning, not realising what had happened, we tried the usual trick when you can't locate the mobile.
Call it and wait for the ring tone.
That didn't work, because we were in Mission Beach and the phone was in Cardwell.
The attempt resulted in a call back from Cardwell. When we got home I found a message on the answering machine as well.
So we got the phone back, and the very least we can do in the way of thanks is to call in for a meal when we're passing. This time the meal amounted to a Tex wrap for Hughesy, crab sangas for Madam, and a couple of coffees.
We were back on the road before one, having bought the loop that will hold the reading glasses around the neck, and preventing a repetition of the servo incident in Townsville on the way up.
On the leg between Cardwell and Cairns the only item of note was the discovery that Hughesy's new iPad, with WiFi rather than 3G technology, lacks GPS capability, which is a pity since I was looking at it as a navigation aid in Japan.
We might still be able to use it in cases where we've got access to WiFi along the way, but the lack of the helpful blue dot indicating your actual GPS-located position limits the value as a navigational aid, and on that basis it looks like the old model will still be in use when we're travelling in Oz.
There were a couple of minor delays on the highway north of Tully, and we found ourselves rolling into the main conurbation at Cairns just after three.
With nothing on the agenda apart from checking into the accommodation at Bay Village Tropical Retreat, we made a booking for the restaurant at seven and eventually managed to squeeze The Possum into the parking space.
You'd reckon it should be easier to get it out again in the morning, but these predictions seem to have a habit of coming unstuck.
With five hours' complimentary WiFi, we settled down to read email, checked the odd link out of there, and, having passed that particular baton over to Madam I set about jotting down the start of the Travelogue.
The complimentary WiFi came with a few quirks that seemed to prevent two devices accessing the came connection simultaneously, so a tag team approach seemed the way to go.
In any case, after the drive Madam wanted a rest before engaging in brain-related activity.
We wandered through to the Balinese restaurant on the premises that had been the motivation for making the hotel reservation, and while dinner wasn't as gobsmackingly scrumptious as it was the previous time one suspects that might have something to do with the fact there were just the two of us this time around.
Our previous visit had The Sister and The Rowdy Niece with us and was, therefore, a matter of four shared dishes between us rather than the one each thin time around.
But the food was good, the service attentive and the Mitchell Watervale Riesling the way it usually is, so Hughesy went to bed a happy camper.
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