The Airport and Take-Off

Tuesday 28th August 2007
at 03:55pm

First things first, some advice. The next time you are travelling, take infants with you. Everything we had to do today we did after being taken straight to the front of the line. Check-In, boarding, customs, you name it, infants are the ticket. If you don’t have them, borrow them, at least for the times where queues need to be avoided.

Final preparations are taken care of and we are on our way to the airport at about 10:15, just 15 minutes later than we had planned. Not bad when you consider the amount of luggage we had packed and the fact that we were doing so with 2 kids under 3. If any of you ever need help with preparing 2 children for overseas travel by the way, ask Kelly. Without her I’d be all over the place. We are a little concerned with Luc though. An awful bout of the flu has left him tired, irritable and with a nose that is running like an Olympic sprinter. Whilst optimistic re: what lies ahead, we are cautiously concerned about his flu, the cabin pressure, take-off and landing.

Everything is going according to plan until the flight, that should have departed at 135pm is delayed 35 minutes to 210pm. No real issue, it just gives us more time with our family and the duty-free shops. Then the flight is delayed until 3pm. This came after we entered customs so the family had long gone. Still not really an issue, but it was becoming inconvenient.

So we board the plane just before 3pm which didn’t bode well for a 3pm departure. Either way, at least we were getting on. Ready and loaded by about 20 past we sat there in our seats. And sat there. And sat there. Supposedly, there was an engineering problem that required particular ‘paperwork’ to be submitted. Paperwork is inverted by the way as I’m not sure the technician walking down the aisle of the cabin with torch in hand was writing much down.  Mental note to Qantas, we love you, you flying symbol of everything that is great about our country but don’t board us if torch bearing techos are trying to fix ‘engineering’ problems at the same time.

By 430 we are happy to be taxi-ing toward take-off. Ben is frustrated though and Luc had already had his bottle, fallen asleep and woken up by the time we were in the air. All of this didn’t exactly fill us with excitement as we embarked on a 14 hour, 12,000km (7,500 mile) flight.

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