The Road to Sydney

The road to sydney started at Edinburgh airport. My brother dropped me off and Helen (his wife) and Owen came along too. The cars suspension took a bit of a hammering from the suitcases and rucksacks but we got there in plenty of time. All was fine until I made my move to go through security and started giving out hugs - that's when I started crying. Then Helen started - the boys stood impassively and by brother commented "she's my sister, why are you crying?" which is about typical!
Anyway we headed through security and it was only yesterday that I realised that I never turned around to wave to them - not sure if that was deliberate or not - certainly not a conscious decision I had made. I felt a bit bad about that later.

The flight was late leaving in Edinburgh by about 90 mins (isn't it always) and so we had less time to mess about in Heathrow We came in at Terminal 5 (no idea what all the fuss was about, it wasn't anything special) and then transferred to Terminal 4 - where we bought books and magazines and what not before boarding the 747.

I had managed to get two seats at the back, in a row with only two seats - so no climbing over people, which was good. It was reasonably cramped and far too hot but at least the movie and TV were on demand. The flight to Bangkok was reasonably uneventful expect a few bits of turbulence and a dizzy air stewardess. Dinner was fish pie, hmmm.

We had 4 hours to mince around in Bangkok airport - which looked nice but didn't have much in it. You aren't allowed to bring in duty free to Oz anyway - have to buy it when you get there (crafty devils) so shopping wasn't even a pastime to indulge in. Eventually we hauled ourselves back on board and settled down for another 8 hours of overheated torture. Dinner this time was Thai Beef and the oddest cheesecake type thing I have ever seen. Hmmm. I managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep and at 5 am was woken up for breakfast of a yogurt and stale croissant (really does it need to be this bad?)before our landing at 6am.

You cleverly have to pass through Australian duty free before you get your bags back so we decided to make use of it and got a bottle of Laphroig, one of Bowmore, and one each of Frangelico and Chambord (need a cocktail shaker now). As well as some perfume for me. We then headed through passport control, got our bags and cleared customs with no more questions than what we had in our bags of value (laptop, jewelry) and did we have any food (yes, t-bags) to which we were fast tracked out without a customs search.

We got in the taxi q and pretty quickly we were heading towards our apartment on Kent Street, which turned out to be on the 50th Floor with a very nice view of Darling Harbour. More of that and our first day in sydney on my next post.