19 Days until FurDU

When my family usually goes on "holidays", that basically insinuates that we're going away to either Busselton in the south-west of WA, or Carnamah in the state's Wheatbelt, but that doesn't mean we're going on holidays specifically. That just means we're going to see our family.

I've only ever been outside of WA twice in my life. Once was back in January 2019 when I was about 11 years old. I was doing Scouts at the time, and the troop was really preparing for me to attend the 2019 Australian Jamboree (AJ2019). This was a 10-day camp that was held in Tailem Bend in South Australia, so I was traveling interstate for the first time in my life.

I remember being on that plane those many years ago. I had never been on a plane in my life before that, and within three months, I had already gone on six different planes (Twice were between Geraldton and Perth, and then the remaining two was between Perth and Adelaide).

That was the last time that I went on a commercial plane. I had also sat in the plane of the company that does charter flights between Geraldton and the Abrolhos Islands, who offered to take a handful of our scouting troop on a flight around Geraldton.

The last time I would get to take a flight on a commercial airplane was for my family's holiday to Denpasar (Bali), Indonesia.

Back in 2024, a year after my Dad broke up with my Mother, his new girlfriend invited us on a holiday to Bali to celebrate her daughter's 21st birthday. Not only was it my first time overseas, but it was also the first time for both my father and my sister. We had to do a whole lot of research about traveling overseas, since we've never done it before. We had to apply for our passports to start off with. At the time, I was under the age of 18, so I had a different process to go through. Whilst it was simple, I had to have my parents sign off on it. My mother got text messages several times from Home Affairs asking if she was going to give permission to have my passport created, but she treated it as spam. It got approved after they called her about it.

And yes, I took my socks overseas.

That was the plan for the days ahead right up until hotel bookings went live on January 30th, 2026. After numerous delays, the FurDU team managed to release the bookings for the hotel rooms at Crowne Plaza. They went up at 7pm local time (AEST) and were sold out in five minutes. Translate that to 5pm here, and during those five minutes, I was working my ass off unloading a pallet full of piss (beer. I work in a bottle shop).

Okay, here's my first crisis of the trip. Actually, I lied, that's not the first. During 2025, I switched from my cafe job to a late-night bar job in the span of two weeks, then resigned from that bar job two months later. I didn't get this job at the bottle shops until another two months later. Thank fuck that this job pays me decently enough to afford a holiday.

Back to the main crisis at hand: I now no longer have accommodation. I couldn't book the hotel rooms during those FIVE MINUTES that I wasn't anywhere near my phone. I feel a bit angry because of how quickly those rooms went from vacant to occupied just like that. Especially with all the delays in waiting, I felt scammed out of it. That's also a problem as well if I wanted to attend night-time events past 10pm (which I won't be), since the hotel will disallow people from entering if they aren't a residing guest.

I ended up forking up a share of $550 just to book an Airbnb about a half-hour walk north from the hotel (thank god for tram lines).