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It’s our final wrap – the pressure! What better way than to start with a joke, and one we told to kick off our speech at the Shine Awards at the beautiful Cruden Farm on Tuesday, just out of Melbourne. If you’ve been to one of our events, chances are you’ve heard this.
How many line dancers does it take to change a light bulb… 5, 6, 7, 8!
(Copyright of this one goes to Claire’s boyfriend Alex, line dancing humour really is the way to this girl’s heart)
We’re fairly sure that at least some of the laughs we received upon telling this joke on Tuesday were genuine, rather than pity laughs, and we very much enjoyed getting to know the other fabulous winners at the lunch. Thanks very much to Harvey Norman and the Weekly Times for putting on the awards and for flying us to Melbourne for the occasion.
We flew back to Brissy on Tuesday night, with Kate discovering a new word on the plane, ‘bolshie’. Now, Claire’s a journo and Kate loves Word of the Day releases more than anyone, yet we hadn’t heard of this one before, and we love it. Even though it means ‘deliberately combative or uncooperative’ – hence a word you’re hoping doesn’t come up too often – Claire spent the following days trying to inject it into most sentences.
Our final event for the whole trip (event number 75) was at Allora State School on Thursday night, Kate’s hometown. The nostalgia was real for Kate, with the holy trifecta of cute kids, line dancing, and knowing every second person all miraculously lining up. How many people there? We lost count at about 110, so decided on 156. It was a great night – thank you to Allora superwoman Jamie for organising the event.
Claire’s friend Sarah had come down to Toowoomba for the Allora event, so it was only fair Claire attended Sarah’s 5:45am boxing class the next morning. Falling asleep before setting the alarm, Claire went from asleep to in class with gloves on in a record 8 minutes, and is fairly sure she did not box correctly due to legs being very sore afterwards, while the arms were fine.
Saturday was the last day of the trip, and the ‘get on stage with Keith Urban day’. After spending far too much on officeworks card to make a sign, security at the Keith concert was annoyingly bolshie by telling us the card wasn’t allowed, and that the sign was too big. While we didn’t get on stage, Kate did catch the wrist band, and yes, that’s going straight to the pool room.
An early birthday celebration was on the cards for Kate on Sunday (her birthday is December 10), so along with her old housemates Will and Lucas, we hit up Kingston Park Raceway. Claire was a bit of a dark horse petrol head, while Kate proudly won safest driver for all four races.
And then, we finally, finally hit the end of the trip, with Claire dropping Kate at the airport to catch the bus to Toowoomba. We had another bolshie airport security guard telling us to ‘get a move on’ (security clearly doesn’t love us), but got a quick snap – a clapping board of stats. True to form, Claire had one shoe on (she doesn’t like driving in shoes) while Kate had lost her sunnies, another recurring theme of the trip.
So, that’s it – we made it. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who has followed our journey and supported us this year. We’ll dribble out some more posts in the coming weeks of trip stats and fun facts, but for now, it’s time for ice baths to recover from go karting bruises, 46,000km on the road and doing the Nutbush at least 100 times.
Yours in bootscootin (for the last time),
Kate and Claire.
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