The Day(s) we Flew to Melbourne

Today, no it was yesterday, we caught a taxi from our Kensington Hotel around to Victoria Station, where Wallsy, true to form, bumped into a colleague and his wife from Australia.  We never fail to go away, anywhere in the world without Wallsy seeing someone he knows from the emergency services back home. 

The Gatwick Express leaves from Victoria Station, so Sloane Square was a convenient accommodation location to access that particular airport. I’ve never flown out of Gatwick before, although we did pick up a hire car from there once. Airwick Gatport (as a tired Wallsy called it over coffee) is huge. It even has an elevated rail link between terminals. 

Once there we navigated our way to the correct terminal, and bought a coffee before saying farewell to Wallsy who is continuing his adventure for a further two weeks. Mark, Julie and I ran the gauntlet of security checks and found our far flung gate lounge, down with the Easy Jet gates - ours was gate 682 (that’s a lot of gates).  


I was both scanned and frisked at security and then my bag was put aside for a further check. When we were finally ready for boarding, our seats came up as problematic, so then we held up the queue while the gate lounge staff sorted that out for us - Mark and I had been very happy with our aisle seats and they weren’t going to wrest them from us without a fight!  

Julie eventually got her window seat on both legs, and Mark and I were switched back to aisle seats. We all had the luxury of an empty seat in the middle on both stretches of the journey as an added bonus. The flights passed, as they do, with very little sleep and plenty of movie watching, until we finally landed on home soil in Melbourne, about an hour earlier than the scheduled flight time. We were pleased to see the Castlemaine Flyer arriving promptly to save us from the cold winter’s night in Melbourne. 

Then it was home to smiling friendly faces, puppy dog cuddles, and my own bed! 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exploring the Emerald Isle

Image
And so the story begins before we have even left home… Bounding out of bed to the sound of the 06:30 alarm, my mind already running through the checklist of things to be achieved before our arranged pick up time of 11:00 am, the first task was to strip the bed of our sheets, get them washed and (hopefully) dried, and the bed made up with fresh linen ready for the arrival of the second of our two teams of housesitters in ten days time. Next, was to do the same with the towels, but as I was pressing ‘start’ on the washing machine full of sheets, Stephen wandered out, phone in hand, saying ‘don’t hurry, we have plenty of time!’ Singapore Airlines had helpfully ‘retimed’ our flight ex Melbourne to 20:05, from the original time of 15:20, according to an email sent at 01:38. Going back to bed was obviously not an option, although of our fellow travellers M & J, J wisely reported taking the decision to grab a couple more hours sleep in lieu of the delay!  We instead, went ahead with o...
Read more

The Day we Walked from Dunquin to Ballyferriter

Image
 We had a later start to the day today, with breakfast at 8:30 am, before setting off for the Blasket Centre; a heritage and cultural museum dealing with the history of the stunning islands that had dominated so much of our view during yesterday’s walk.  The people who had lived there until the islands were abandoned in 1953, had been isolated, not so much by distance from the mainland, but by the harshness of the environment and the often impassable seas. They existed on subsistence farming and fishing, speaking only the Irish language.  When all the young people eventually left for a life of opportunity in other countries however, there were no men to man the fishing boats, and those remaining were forced to admit they could not survive there any longer.  It was a moving story told through comprehensive interactive displays, and we spent a couple of hours immersed in the experience.  After a coffee, we finally set out for today’s leg of the walk to Ballyferrit...
Read more

Robin’s Birthday Surprise - Christchurch

Image
 In the series of birthday surprises, the first was that we got to fly Business Class in a very empty plane (30 passengers!) from Melbourne to Christchurch. Apparently the stars had aligned - a Qantas sale (who can pass that up? Certainly not Wallsy!) and an event, still to be revealed, in NZ. I was also presented with sweet treats, champagne, a qantas cap, qantas keyring and a birthday card. How’s that for a series of surprises!?  The second surprise was that we are staying at the gorgeous Adina Heritage Hotel which I had admired last time we were here and staying over the road from this impressive old Government building that is now the Adina. Not only do I get to see inside this time, I get to sleep in one of its spacious studio apartments for two nights. But that was not the only surprise, it was more importantly the fact that we actually managed to get into the hotel at 12:30am!  Initially faced with a locked door, no response to the intercom and our taxi driving off...
Read more