An early 7:00am walk to the station to begin the trip to Brisbane. My mobile phone had just started a poorly timed major update as I was leaving and was still only at 40% when I needed to use it to unlock the security gate.
It was taking too long to increase even one percent so I gave up waiting and walked back the longer way around, taking about twice as long. I didn't know at the time but the security gate wasn't even working anyway because the phone number to unlock it was out of service - somebody must have forgotten to pay the bill...
Despite the delay I still got to the city around 8:00am but just missed the sky bus and had to wait ten minutes for the next one. It was a pretty quiet trip to the airport on Friday morning, then off to the crappy terminal two that has nothing besides a Boost Juice kiosk. The flight was delayed by about fifteen minutes due to fog at the other end in Brisbane and was also quite slow to leave the gate and actually take off. Still with all that accounted for we landed within thirty minutes of the expected arrival time, but I was in no hurry at all.
Instead of going straight to the city I got the free bus over to the airport DFO. Unfortunately I walked the entire long way around the centre to reach the Nike store since there wasn't a map around. I found a pair of Vomero 17 for half price at $85, but no good shorts or shirts like always. I only had room for one pair of shoes in my luggage at most, so I didn't continue with all the other stores afterwards. I wore a pair of running shoes that have almost reached their end of life and the rare one thousand kilometres milestone (975 kilometres so far) so that I could throw them out before heading home if I found a new pair to wear.
The local bus was due to leave for Toombul shopping centre, so I got on that instead of going back to the airport and getting the sky train. I thought this would also be a good chance to stop for lunch however the entire shopping centre was being knocked down for redevelopment. Instead I got an empty lunch time train to Brisbane Central and a sad quick lunch from Woolworths metro to sit down and eat.
I noticed a lot of signage for two new train lines through the city and into the suburbs which looks useful - definitely better than the Melbourne suburban rail loop, as well as the new metro tunnel that doesn't actually achieve much of anything. I also noticed an Officeworks nearby so went in to get some passport photos taken to start the renewal process before my password expires in a few months - and before the price goes up dramatically too. The USA are a rare exception but most countries won't let you travel with a passport expiring in less than six months, which is pretty stupid if you have proof of a return flight already booked and paid for.
Since it was almost 3pm I could walk across to the hotel for check-in. I got changed and went for a run through the Botanic Gardens and alongside the river on the opposite side, but a bit further than I originally planned. I saw people picking up bibs for the marathon festival on the way back but decided to hold off and come back tomorrow with my email confirmation.
For the day a total of 9km running, plus 1.5km running to the station in the morning, plus lots of walking was not a good start to race preparation for Sunday. Besides a slow parkrun tomorrow morning I planned to have an easy Saturday to make up for it.
Back at the hotel to get changed I found they had a nice small indoor pool and a 24 hour sauna and steam room. Headed out to the closest Coles supermarket for some snacks and drinks for the weekend. I found a banana and cookies & cream flavoured milk for something other than the same old stuff in every other aisle, nothing else is different across the country really.
There was also a Subway store across the road from the hotel so I picked up a sandwich on the way back too and just watched some TV shows on my computer while having dinner. Annoyingly the 7mate channel was broken on the TV so I couldn't watch the Friday night AFL match afterwards.