Here I Go Again

This is the Albany Highway ^ and nice it may look, soon gets a bit boring after about 100km and we were on it for 400. The road kill is different here, whereas back home you’ll get the odd hedgehog or maybe even a squirrel, down here its kangaroos, I was quite excited to see my first kangaroo I didn’t expect it to be a dead one, in fact I haven’t seen any live ones yet.

We reached Albany just before it was getting dark so by the time we got checked in to the hostel and moved our bags in the sun was going down and we had a look around. My first impressions of the town were good and were heightened after the pizza. We played some pool then back at the hostel for a bit then saw a listings sheet for the local cinema that was showing Transformers! This was a no-brainer so set off. The cinema didn’t look anything special, from the outside it looked like a fairly standard small town cinema and the foyer was only big enough for the sales desk thing, some sweet shelves and a small queue but the actual screen was actually quite big fair play so I was pleasantly surprised. Transformers is awesome by the way!

The Australians seem to like their films though, they’re very vocal when watching them, there were a lot of ‘yay’s and ‘boo’s at the appropriate parts which I found quite funny, back home people are usually quite quiet until there’s a funny bit worth laughing at.

We found this bar last night (Thurs 28/06) called Mustangs which is cool, it plays Fox sports on the projector and always has mountain biking videos playing on one of the TV screens. They were running a pool and table tennis competitions that night too, we joined the pool one which cost $5 and you get a free beer (which we actually worked out that it was cheaper to keep buying into the pool competition than to buy beers on their own - and you get a game of pool). Jonny was up first and did quite well against a guy called Ralph, he managed to get to the black but Ralph ended up getting it first. Then it was my go, I was playing a guy called Jerry. I lost, quite quickly actually, I started chatting to Jerry afterwards and he told me he knew he was going to win as soon as he saw the way I held the cue. He also told me that he’s been winning the pool competition there for 3 weeks and has won 491 competitions altogether… I should have know my chances were low when he pulled a nail file out of his pocket to smooth his cue tip before we started the game. Later on he pulled me aside and showed me a few things like how to hold the cue and a few other secrets I won’t share so that I can try and have some sort of advantage next time I play. We didn’t have time to join the table tennis one though which was a shame ‘coz I’m sure I could have won a few matches there after watching some of the other players, maybe next time. Jerry’s the guy in the read Coca Cola tshirt, and later on his hands and knees trying to break dance.