Memorable Monto

Monto has two hotels, The Grand (the bottom pub) and The Albert (the top pub).  The top pub appeared to be the nicer of the two, so we had made a booking there.  

The centre parking in the main street was filled with utes and there was plenty of high-viz clothing about.  Jan took a good look at one of these workers and he turned out to be a friend of her son's. He told us they were doing a lot of flood repair work on the local roads controlled by the council.

Off to the Albert we trotted, where there was no record of our booking.  
'Who took the booking?' asked the girl? 'The person who answered the phone' says Jan! She and Jo ended up in a three-bed room where one bed was not made up, and I was across a corridor in a two-bed room with one of the beds unmade from the night before.  They were very hot and hard to cool with above-door windows which were stuck closed, and only had a single pedestal fan to do the job.  I think the bigger room was the one my family stayed in when we passed through Monto in 1961 and I left my security blanket at the hotel.  The nice people posted it home for me (after Mum and Dad paid for the postage).
 
As there were no mirrors in the rooms and only a tiny one in the bathroom, this was not a night for a fashion parade of the day's acquisitions.  The ladies' facilities are worth analysis.  At the other end of a long dark corridor is the single door which leads to all this.  The showers open out onto the main floor area, with nowhere to put your stuff and not a single hook in the whole place.  The light switch is on a timer, so if the light goes out while you are in the shower, you have to remember the big step down out of the shower, so you don't break your neck in the dark.  And to have a shower, you must close the outer door, thus denying any other women access to the toilet. Luckily, there was only us plus the high-viz boys.

We joined them in the bar while the rooms cooled down and that's when we discovered that the young woman pulling the beers, who can't have been more than about 23, was running the whole show on her own.

That night we self-catered, thanks to a cooked chook from the Monto IGA, in the hotel's communal kitchen, which is really nice.  The game for the evening was The  Travel Quiz Game, which is easy to play, but not entirely trustworthy, as it thinks Anchorage is the capital of Alaska.  
You will note that we used the Revolving Party Jet-Set for our snacks.



I decided one extra glass of wine wouldn't hurt, and then went off to bed.  That's when the fun started. My room was over the dining room, but Jo's and Jan's room was directly over the bar.  The noise from the bar got louder and louder. Jo rang and asked when the bar closed. 12. 'I'll turn the jukebox down'. She did, but that didn't disguise what sounded like furniture being thrown about and other unidentifiable acts of violence. 
 
It was 12.30 before they were all out on the street and the girls could get some sleep.  Luckily none of the offenders were actually staying in the hotel. All the high-viz boys had gone to bed early so they could wake up for work at 4am and wake the girls up again.

Meanwhile, I slept like a log and was up early to enjoy coffee and my crossword puzzle in the communal kitchen, and photograph the early morning light on the beautiful wide verandah.

When the zombies finally arose, and we were fed, coffeed, packed and had loaded the car, we were amazed that all looked normal and calm downstairs.  Perhaps that was a normal night at the Albert?

Monto only has one op shop - Vinnies - but when we arrived there, we discovered they didn't open till 10am.  We whiled away some time in the main street, then tried again at 10.05.  Still closed. Eventually a slightly stressed woman arrived, apologised and let us in, but omitted to turn on the lights.

It was fill-a-bag for $5 day, so lots of other people were right behind us.  When the lights eventually came on, we discovered a really lovely op shop, clean and tidy, but with heaps of stock and good prices.

Drama continued,however, when the ladies discovered they couldn't open the till. With customers stacking up at the counter, a helpful gentleman managed to open it so they could get at the money, but still nothing could be rung up.

Jo decided to get in the high-viz mood by trying on this little number, but it didn't actually fit.  

My haul was a pair of shorts (part of the communal $5 clothing bag), a pair of shoes , a necklace and a pair of earrings, each at $2.

And I forgot to mention that Monto also has a lovely Art Deco council chambers, although not as spectacular as the Murgon public hall.

That was it for our Monto experience, so we now continued north towards Biloela, last visited by the McBurneys with a broken windscreen in our red Renault in 1977.  Neither Jan nor Jo had never been there.