The road ahead...

Once the races were over, and myself, Jason and Paul were unemployed, we all decided that we were going to leave Melbourne and go to Sydney for Christmas. Jimmy was the only one working but he decided he would come with us too.

We had a look at the various ways of getting there and decided the train would suit us best. The day we were going to book the tickets, Paul had a change of heart. He decided he wasn’t coming to Sydney, he was going to go home instead. I understood how he felt, he was only 20 and he had run out of money and missed home so I went into town with him and he changed his flights and booked one home for that Friday, the day we were going to Sydney.

We all went on the piss quite a bit then in our last week in Melbourne and we were all looking forward to something new in Sydney.

We gave the landlord notice that we were leaving and so on the day we were packing up, we were waiting on him to arrive so that he could give us back our bond. When he arrived, he started complaining that the house was dirty and that Paul owed him money. Paul did owe him a small amount of money, but the dirt in the house was from the two girls who were still going to be living there so we didn’t want to clean that up. He told us we would not get our bond back and then that after all deductions were taken out of it, we were only getting $50 each back anyway.

He left the house for a while so instead of cleaning it up, we grabbed our bags and headed off.

We got the train on the Friday evening, we met Jimmy there as he had been working that day. The train was an 11 hour journey so we would be traveling overnight. When we got seated on the train, we took out the deck of cards and had a few games. One of the guys working on the train noticed that we couldn’t play comfortably across the middle aisle of the train so he got us a different seat where we were facing each other and we had a proper table too. It was great. We then took out the poker chips and turned it into our own little poker den.

As we played away, a couple of Aussie guys noticed and wanted to join in. We had a couple of games against them while Jay went to bed. Before we knew it, it was 6am and we were almost at our destination.

Here it was, Sydney. Now all we needed was accommodation….and of course….some jobs.