Make yourself at home (somewhere in south west Queensland)

 

We are incredibly grateful for the opportunities we've had during the past decade and more.  We've mostly been free to travel without the constraints of having to plan our movements beyond the next few minutes.  Life on a boat, or a car with a tent gives unlimited flexibility, notwithstanding the need for water or the merest semblance of a road to guide one on one's way.  To travel without living from a suitcase, whether because one is carrying nought, or because one is travelling in the comfort of one's home, is to really travel.

There we were in the month of May (and a bit of June) in once familiar territory without the benefit of boat or tent, reminding ourselves of earlier times when we carried our stuff in bags, this time with our movements constrained by bookings made almost a year before.  

Our accomodation though mostly not at the absolute budget end of the spectrum, (admittedly this was mostly because we didn't actually confirm our reservations until way too late and our choice was limited at best), invariably provided a number of constants as though each place had been working from a manual.

Just as the larger, more salubrious hotel chains strive for a consistency between each location, these lesser places were also not without a host of comforting reminders that these were not the sorts of places where no man had been before.  

Though always serviceably clean, sometimes in a "could do better" kind of way, there were reminders that this was not home: The dog-ears on the breakfast menus flying in the face of one-use-only Covid rules, the bit of sticky tape to hold the battery covers on the tv remotes, the shower roses that were at exactly the wrong height, and our favourite; that lingering smell that is always there, always the same, a mix of the faintest whiff of forbidden tobacco smoke lingering in the chenille bedspread and a furtive attempt to conceal it by rubbing it with what we can only guess was one of those cardboard car air fresheners that's invariably shaped like a pineapple.