Arriving early for the 1.00pm restaurant booking at the Heritage Restaurant we thought we might sit at an outside bar and enjoy some cold refreshment before entering the roped off festival enclosure.
I noticed the constabulary were out in full force.
Wow, maybe this was going to get a bit exciting later on, I thought in anticipation.
"If that's all we get for our ten dollars I want my money back!"
complained a woman walking back from the festival and passing close by our table.
"Well that was a load of crap! There was nothing there!" grumbled another.
Ah people always like to have a whinge... I mused optimistically.
"Does it really cost ten dollars to get in?" I asked Scotto.
"Maybe I can use my Pinky Poinker press card and we can get in for free!"
"What Press Card?" he queried.
"You know, those cards you printed out for me when I was hounding people to vote for me in the blogging comp."
"It's hardly a press card," he remarked whilst rakishly trying on my fascinator he'd discovered still in my bag since the day at the races.
We walked to the long line up and waited patiently. When it was our turn I smiled confidently at the girl taking the money and held up the card,
"Hi! I'm Pinky Poinker! I'll be writing a review of the festival on my lifestyle blog. We'll be right to just walk through then?"
"Oh! Just one moment... I'll check my list." she picked up a clipboard and scanned it.
Shockingly, we weren't on the list and had to cough up the twenty bucks.
The part of the street blocked off for the festival still reeked from the night club shenanigans of Friday night. Julie had booked an outside table at the Restaurant but the entire area smelled like a sewer. No drinks were being served outside because of licensing regulations either so we had no choice but to go and sit inside the dingy interior. Such a shame on such a beautiful Townsville Winter day.
(L-R) Julie, Scotto, Stu, Alan, Val, Dolly)
The only food available were seven dollar plates of seafood for which you had to line up at a singular lonely stall in a queue of roughly one thousand people.
Remember the story about the feeding the multitudes with the loaves and fishes? Well unlike our Lord and Saviour, these caterers ran out.
At 3:30 none of us had eaten, however, copious amounts of wine had been consumed and we'd worked up a massive appetite so it was off to the Chinese restaurant down the road where we saturated out bloodstream with mono-sodium glugglutinate.
(L-R) Pinky, Les, Alan, Julie, Patrice, Dolly, Mark, Stu, Val.)
I heard no jazz music and I ate no seafood. None of us did. Although I did bump into my twenty year old son, Hagar and his girlfriend Meggles, and they'd managed to procure a plate of something fishy after lining up in the hot sun for thirty minutes.
Hagar is always so thrilled to run into his mother!
I don't like to criticise anything or anyone in my blog so all I'll say is this:
If all it takes to produce a successful seafood/jazz festival is a face-painting stall, a pointless admission fee, an odd, out of place stall selling wind-up dogs, one food stall that runs out of seafood early in the day, an abhorrent stench pervading the entire area and no jazz music... then it was an extremely triumphant event in our fair city.