Traveling Madmen Part II

Whats green and purple, travels at 40kph (up hill) and is full of energy drinks and pasta. If you haven't guessed its our van.



Jucy Lucy is our 1.5 meter tall camper van made from metal and hope. Mostly hope. She got us from Brisbane to Melbourne without much incident, well we did manage to hit a kangaroo but he was fine. Im sure he has a freakish fear of cars now but thats a good thing.....right? The first stop after Brisbane was Surfers Paradise.

I would now like to talk about what I saw in Surfers


Schoolies


Pronounced - school·ie

–noun
1.
a fish that swims within a school.
2.
Australian Informal. a schoolteacher or student.

At this time of year the students in the high school final years are let out of their galvanized country homes to flock....wait....flock is too soft a word SWARM to the gold coast to drink, curse (not very brightly) and fornicate in public. We were convinced to go on one of those "G'day mate! Fancy going on a night out?" trips. We agreed and attended. The drink was good, the music was what you would expect it to be in a series o night clubs and the people were, for the most part, underage. I have never seen such a gathering of underagers in my life. There was, and I shit you not, about 1000 of them crowding the center of town when Conor and I stumbled out of the last nightclub. There were kids dancing on bins, fighting, getting sick, fighting on bins while getting sick, fighting to get sick into bins, fighting bins of sick and being escorted home by either the police or taking the scenic route home via the stomach pump ward and Im relatively sure that the local hospital has a ward dedicated to this by now and if it doesn't it would need one or at least a tent set up on the main beach or something like that.

I felt old.

Old and bitter

I felt, more than once, like going up to one of these "schoolies" slapping them across the face and asking them in my most horrified Irish mammy voice "Does your mother know you are out this late?" or "Do you even know how to spell the word vagina? Get off that girl! I have a some words for you to learn. Fatherhood and child benefit"

I guess i was, in a way, slightly jealous. I looked at one or too and saw me. A younger, drunker me. A younger drunker me fighting to get sick in a bin. Then I remembered. Responsibility is about to hit them. You finish school and the wonderful, criticizing, judging world comes crashing down. Happy with this thought I felt better about the whole thing. Let them have their fun and watch out for the bins in Surfers Paradise.

Redman out