17 March 2011: Get The Hell Outa Here!!

Get The Hell Outa Here!!

It’s finally arrived!!! We’re off to foreign lands to do exciting and exotic things.

The trip out to Tullamarine was your normal, uneventful cab ride but that’s where the boredom ended. “Your flight has been delayed I’m sorry to say” said the customer service woman at the Qantas desk. “It’s a two hour delay due to failed hydraulics on the left hand side of the aircraft” Hard to get angry about something like that, would much rather the delay than to discover that the rudder refuses to do as its told at 10,000 feet.

The seven-hour flight to Singapore was relatively uneventful and as it was early evening, we took the opportunity to catch up on some shuteye. High altitude training is something of a revolution amongst our sporting fraternity but I can tell you that it had no impact on Michelle, she still snores at 30,000 feet…but she does it with style.

Singapore to London was the big leg of the trip and we were excited about getting closer to our ultimate destination of Rome. When we got to our allocated seats on the plane, we discovered we were planted in the middle seats of a set of four with two women on either end accompanied by their seven month old baby girls. Rule a line through any thoughts of meaningful sleep on the fifteen-hour flight.

Surprisingly, the little girls were extremely well behaved and we touched down in London as well as one can expect having travelled that far. I have only ever been to Heathrow once before and that was in 1983, let me tell you, nothing much has changed. There’s a million things I could write about the English and their attitude, so I’m just going to be very polite and quote my travelling companion on this one, “every time I come here, I swear it will be the last….”

This photo shows us flying over the Swiss Alps.

Bella Rome! After 30 something travelling hours, here we are!!!!