Day 1 – Airports

Executive Summary

Left house to possums, wore the same clothes for 30 hours straight, seemingly consumed seven meals in the same period (happily each with an accompanying glass of wine), and, finally, settled into our cosy Paris flat the size of which would give a swung cut multiple head injuries, sometime around 5:30 pm Wednesday afternoon. For those with a hunger for detail and more time to burn; read on.

There’s some chance that feeding ‘Nungas’ the possum bananas has made him overly familiar. Familiar not for joining me at table with said banana but for how he fried them in butter and brown sugar beforehand.

It was 3 am and Nungas and I were bashing out some invoices before taking off in the morning. A steady stream of Nungas’ mates coursed through the house enjoying their final meal before we left, disturbing the still of the night with their scurrying and culinary exploits.

Not an ideal departure this morning but exciting to be going nonetheless. Di’s Kenana Christmas stock, due some weeks earlier, arrives tomorrow, as we arrive in the Odeon. Whether or not customers will take it so close to Christmas is a bit of an unknown. Assuming they do, Di will need to work with Jordy at home to get it all dispatched. Not what we’d planned but hey, neither was the airport this morning…

The departure hall’s vast expanse, was swollen with triple stacked trolley wagon trains and concerned looking tourists, craning their necks to find the source of the delay. The link between the check-in software and the customs clearance platform had gone down globally, no chuffed looks from short-cut-business-queue-suits this morning, we were together grounded.

We could check in, in some cases drop bags, but get no boarding passes. Hats off to the Qantas staff though, ‘Global software collapse’ is not a phrase you’d typically associate with rapid transit (or happy holiday) but, with scarcely affected smiles they trickled us through manually (first hand written boarding passes ever). After maybe half an hour of manual processing, steady throng expansion and rising mob tension, a happy announcement and a loud cheer from all and sundry heralded our reprieve.

Somewhere in Bangladesh a team of sweat drenched computer programmers breathed a sigh of relief…and rolled back that latest software patch release until after Christmas.

Changi was great. We’ve never had time to explore, and whilst we’d sooner be wandering the streets of Paris, the fast train through ‘The Jewel’ waterfall, the many gardens and art works – and the free leg massaging machines, easily filled our six hour stop over. The newly completed Qantas lounge bar also helped.

Long leg to Heathrow was an easy run with some nice leg room but Heathrow terminal was a nightmare. Apparently they’re not equipped for simultaneous, multiple flights, (which makes one wonder what they are equipped for), and we queued with hundreds of others, cattle-racing our way to the tediously slow scanning machines. With ten minutes to spare before our connecting flight departed we got through security only to watch with horror as one of our carry on bags got diverted left to the “manual search” lane – noooooo! For the first of the six bags in front of ours the plump, somber looking lady removed items one by one inquiring as to the contents of each and carefully packaging them into plastic clip lock bags. Pleas for mercy; ‘our flight’s closed’, ‘my husbands gone into cardiac arrest’, ‘do you have a match I’m going to immolate myself’, affected her dogged thoroughness, not at all, and we stood helpless as, one-by-one, our flights closed. Finally we were able to make an optimistic sprint to the gate to see our boarding bus still waiting, full of passengers, behind closed doors – so close.

Happily the process to reschedule our flight was simple and we were redirected to the BA first class lounge for a couple of hours. Smack in the middle of that ‘where am I?’, ‘what time is it?’, ‘what species am I?’ period of international travel we opted for a panochocolate, bacon and eggs and champaign breakfast / lunch / dinner? Before heading off at about noon.

Some hours and trains later we found ourselves sitting happily, if a little tired, sipping wine under the heaters at a street front cafe somewhere off Boulevard Saint Germain recapping the days adventures.