Hobart 2023, January 27

A short trip to Hobart after the Australia Day public holiday. For the first time ever the train, bus and flight all ran on time, even had a bus waiting to go after landing. Got off the bus in Hobart by 12:30pm, ahead of schedule but unfortunately that mean the hotel check-in wasn't open for another hour and a half.

Had lunch in the city and walked around for a while to kill some time, but had to carry a backpack and laptop bag everywhere so that wasn't so good. After check-in walked back to the supermarket to get some food for the weekend, but there's only one supermarket in the city and a long way from the hotel, not very convenient.

Had an early dinner back at the hotel, watched some tennis and videos off a USB drive, which actually worked straight through the TV so didn't really need to bring a laptop, although it's still a better alternative than spending the whole weekend on a mobile phone web browser.

Back into the city again to wait at the bus interchange for one of three special buses to the NBL game Tasmania vs. Sydney Kings, bonus that it was free but you can apparently pay for tickets on board with cash still on other services. The stadium is about ten kilometres north-west of the city along a main highway so a bus was the best option - I don't know why it's so far away.

Since I got the first bus I was at my seat with about 45 minutes until the game started, but had a bit of pre-game entertainment and warm-ups to pass the time. Sadly they were handing out stupid plastic clappers at the entrance, and was I sitting next to some old people using them for the entire game, even when their team was losing.

The Kings played really bad in the first quarter with lots of turnovers and were down by more than 10 points, everything changed from the second quarter and they were ahead by 20 by the third quarter and had an easy win. The crowd was surprisingly good for a new team in the competition and the match was sold out.

They also had buses waiting to go back to the city once the match ended, it was organised well.