Welcome, one and all, to the most frelled-up school week in Queensland. Because of the Royal National Agricultural exhibition, everyone has Wednesday off, and various school children in various districts get an extra day of the week off of school.
If that extra day happens on a Monday, then you get an awful lot of sickies being thrown on the following Tuesday. Or, as we like to call it, "the super long weekend". Similar things happen to the Thursday if the day off falls on a Friday.
It's got to the point where nobody expects any education on Ekka Week. I've floated the concept where they might as well give everyone the entire week off, because that's what happens anyway.
Give it 40 years. It'll happen.
But we're sensible nerds in this house, and we're not going anywhere NEAR the overcrowded, malnourished, disease vector known by one and all as the Ekka. Besides, it's a blatant rip-off and we have nowhere near enough money to both go there and have a good time. When it costs over $400 to get your family inside the gates, it's a bit beyond ridiculous.
And don't get me started on the showbags.
Ugh.
$50 for a plastic bag that contains two or three dollar shop toys, some "fun size" lollies, and allegedly hundreds of dollars in buy-one-get-one-free vouchers that nobody in the annals of history has ever used.
Allow me to nope so fast out of there that I never went.
If I was running things, I'd have a serious look at all the price gouging going on in there. But I'm not, so I never will. Bluh. I just have to satisfy myself at staying away from the biggest rip-off of the year.