ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
After what’s seemed like literal months of pinching pennies and eating Mi-Goreng out of a stolen schooner glass, East Betoota hairdresser Annie Deggert is finally off on her trip overseas that she’s been planning since early last year.
The wanderlust bug bit the 32-year-old hard after the death of her cat Nibbles, who was run over and killed by The Advocate‘s editor, Clancy Overell, after a heated mid-afternoon argument.
“I just needed to get out, I felt trapped,” she said. “The magistrate helped me with Clancy and he can’t come within 500m of me or the salon. But I still felt there was something missing.”
Knocking off early one morning in August, Deggert set out on foot from her salon to the Caltex around the corner to buy a pouch of White Ox, a can of original flavour Pringles and a jet lighter. But something else caught her eye along the way.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” she said. “As I was walking past Dennis’ Travel Barn, I saw that they had a deal to go to Lord Howe Island, or whatever that place is called. It’s on your way to South America from here, I think.”
“The next morning, I sat down with Dennis and had cone while we mulled through the brochures. When he left to go and buy some microwave hamburgers for us both, I saw what I wanted.”
And that, as they say, was that.
Being the community-minded travel agent he is, Dennis let her book the trip then and there. He even took her photo for her passport application at no extra charge.
“I’m so excited, but my passport photo is a bit gross. I have a bit of a double chin and there’s tomato sauce in the corners of my mouth. But yeah, heading off in an hour. Wish me luck, you stupid cunt.”
Prior to her flight leaving, Annie created her Instagram account and made her first post one of her passport and boarding pass – putting her mind at ease.
“I almost forgot to gram the boarding pass” she says.
“That would have been pointless. All this for nothing”
“I’m glad I snuck one up”
When Annie reappears back in the bowels of Bettoota commerce she needs to pinch a few more pennies and get herself a bogan discount asian manicure and then up her daily lung candy intake so as she’s not wasting her time gnawing at her thumb nail.
Or are those documents in the mini maw of that well known petite-handed girly man, Patrice Everesté?
Just sayin’,
Phil Aregree.