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Two birthdays and one QF719 later...

Blue Beastie now has a new home in Tridge’s garage, his third spare guest bike. Tridge and Andrew Bartlett condescended to be interviewed, and as this drew to a close, Steven Hanley came pelting in and started dragging people out to the van for the Perth airport run. While I hastily packed, Steve and Tridge set about preparing Blue Beastie for being packed into a bike box for transport, only to discover that the handlebar boss is rusted solid and wouldn’t turn to fit into a box – so there Beastie remains.

Thanks, James Andrewartha, for interview-recording services (plus an intelligent question during the interview); it turns out that one of the deficiencies of an AOpen OpenBook 1547 laptop is that there is no mic in, only a line-in. To the amusement of Bruce, the bloke next to me on the ’plane (which would have only been about half full), we passed a crossover cable between rows to shovel the audio data across in flight. For some reason, “all in a bunch, together” means “all in the same column” (not row) to Qantas.

The post-biking party went well, including two birthday cakes, and was also massively over-catered. Tridge spent some considerable time “auctioning” chips, cool drinks, chocolate cheesecake and other things for the price of ”take it away”. To all you pikers out there who couldn’t be bothered trotting along, well, your loss.

The trip to the airport was also fun in the sense of a conquered set of minor challenges, I rode shotgun with two laptops and a rucksack in my lap, a suitcase wedged down between the front seats with me dragging it left so that Steven could steer, and also holding his drink can except for the straight bits where wrangling the van (with Steven, Trent Lloyd, Cameron Patrick, Mark Tearle, James Andrewartha, Chris McCormick, one other random, Stewart Smith, the entire “boot” area of the tail crammed to the ceiling with bags and most people nursing) wasn’t such an issue.

Dinner was Penne Pasta. One of the hostesses, Lisa, was on her third flight, and one of the hosts (total of 5 for a half-empty ’plane!) was having trouble uploading his brother’s website to Telstra. If you yak to the staff a lot, you get extra chocolates and ice-creams (Mark got my second ice-cream, I was getting kind of full). Part of the in-flight movie was a Mr Bean (the one with the remote-controlled wheelchair). Perth was chaos as a few large flights had arrived at once. And it’s good night from me.

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