Thinking Allowed: Running the border

We woke up to the first morning of 2022 in Port Macquarie. Sophia had stayed up past midnight with Aurora and me, drinking sparkling grape juice straight from the bottle, playing Gin Rummy and counting down with great excitement - and woke up bright and early without complaint. Aurora and Tova were rather slower off the mark, but we chivvied them out of bed anyway since today we had to make it all the way to Brisbane, crossing the dreaded Queensland border.

One of the many Covid dramas of Australian politics has been border closures. State Premiers are endlessly dunking on each other by denying entry to other citizens. Queensland declared all of New South Wales one giant "hotspot", and I don't even want to describe the dysfunction that we faced. People lining up from 2 a.m. to get PCR tests, only to receive the results more than 72 hours later, making them useless for entering Queensland. Given that Queensland, which has over 5 million people, saw its population swell by over 10% in the past months as tourists found ways in. Anyway, on the very last day before our midnight wakeup, the Premier declared that a Rapid Antigen Test was good enough, and by noon we had hit up a small pharmacy in Laurieton (there's an anagram of this town's name that, three days later, I still haven't guessed, don't tell me) and bought six of them.

Having all tested negative (Aurora quaked with fear at self-administering the swab but soldiered through), we headed out this morning, Queensland-bound. First we stopped at Coffs Harbour, where I enjoyed an excellent coffee at a sort of goth cafe called Dark Arts. Then on to Golden Beach, where Aurora met up with a friend who'd moved to the coast, and we were inspired by their chaotic-yet-idyllic family life - their house was all kittens, electric basses, motorboats, furniture made out of motorcycles, stones, rope. Plus Tova splashed into the sea and started screaming blue murder within a minute as a Portuguese man o' war maimed her leg with its acidic tendrils. Finally we reached Queensland, where the bored guard waves us through as I fumbled to find our border passes.

Our Brisbane hotel is sooo sketchy. The parking lot had six people in it, all wearing a lot of leather and iron. Turns out the bar on the ground floor is hosting a heavy metal concert tonight. The clerk cheerfully offered to give us earplugs if it was an issue as skinheads and mohawks stomped by. They gave us complementary drinks - I got a month-old glass of Shiraz and Tamar got a "ginger dry". The bar has these big lights labeled "Danger" and "Evac". The band was thrashing a song called "F*** This Place", and as I passed them someone slapped the overweight guitarist on the ass so hard it made a loud cracking sound. Our rooms turned out to be incredibly huge, with graffiti and electric guitar art on the walls. We ate instant Ramen for dinner, Zadie's last question before lights-out was whether a housefly would be killed if it were stung by a jellyfish and, somehow, this all feels just right for our arrival in Brisbane.