Where to start?

Well 2 weeks have whipped by in a frenzied blur of activity and so I am struggling at this point as to where to start. I guess I’ll resort to that most basic of tactics and use the beginning for it’s intended purpose.

Before I get into the whole journey part of this, I should note that whilst stuck here on my own I received an email from Caroline saying this:

“I assume that you will get this fairly soon as you should be at work by now. It is 1am and I should be sleeping. I didn't get home until after midnight tonight though because I had to take Thomas to the hospital with a door reconstructed pinkie. As it turns out it was dislocated, they gave him some pain reducing drugs and pulled it into place. He was a champ and is now sleeping.”

Poor little Thomas, struck by the Temby finger curse …again. Fortunately he’s fine. Not the greatest thing to get in your email, even if it is over and done before you even know about it.

So having said that, I flew out of Canada all on my lonesome, looking forward to all the wonderful airport exchanges that I was likely to see along the way. There were some tight connections and so it was with some trepidation that I approached the Air Canada portion of the flight. When Caroline and the kids flew out, they were able to have their luggage checked right through to Melbourne, which meant that they only had to collect it in Vancouver to clear customs and avoided doing so in LA.

My first disappointment of the trip was right at the start in Fort Mac when they told me that despite the fact that they’d managed to do so just a week a and half earlier, they were unable to do this for me and I would have to collect my luggage in LA. What they didn’t tell me was that I would also have to collect my bag in Calgary.

So after traipsing all through Calgary airport, following the seemingly endless path of signs for international transfers, I arrived at a point where they told me I would have to collect my luggage before re-checking it a little further on. Which was fine, except for the fact that my luggage was not there. I waited. I tried patience. I walked back outside to the Air Canada check in and asked (yes, that’s how desperate I was starting to feel). They told me that it could take 20 minutes for my bag to travel through the system and get to that point. I went back and waited some more given that it had only been 15 minutes at this point.

Some random number of minutes after that and my bag finally arrived. I rechecked it and set off for LA.

There’s a reason why when we flew back last year that we went Vancouver to Sydney, but cheap flights routed us back through LA again this year and I remembered what that reason was. LA is busy as buggery and quite simply, a nice airport to avoid. I waited for my bag to arrive … last one off the plane thanks … and then walked around to the other terminal where I could check in to Qantas. At this point they asked me when I had bought my ticket (queue nerves). I told them that it was only a month or so ago and that’s when they let me know that the luggage allowances had changed and I was over the limit. Crap. I’d made it that far … perhaps I shouldn’t have bought all that duty free icewine whilst waiting for my baggage in Calgary.

The nice aussie bloke behind the counter was kind enough to suggest that as I had only a single small carry-on bag, that I could fit some stuff in a second bag … which he actually went and got for me! I rearranged, and then was allowed to go line up to have my luggage scanned. And then of course, go line up to have my hand luggage and myself scanned. Finally I was able to make my way to the gate.

And it was at that point that the announcement came over the loudspeaker to say that as the plane was at maximum capacity (yay) they would be checking and weighing hand luggage! Oh great, so here I’ve just rearranged weight into my hand luggage and now they’re going to weigh it. Bastards. Fortunately I managed to slip through without being weighed and made it all the way to Adelaide from that point without incident.

I even managed to snatch a good couple of hours sleep on the way over which meant that I wasn’t a massive wreck when I arrived, though there’s some massive gaps in some of the movies that I watched on route.

What does one do when you arrive on a Sunday morning, hell you arrange for people to come and see you in the park of course so that you’ve a half decent excuse to get stuck into a nice cold Coopers Sparkling Ale. It was great to catch up with the people that were able to make it and a most enjoyable way to keep from going to bed too early.

Then it was a case of preparing for the trip to Pt Hughes, the holiday within a holiday. It seems rather decadent to travel half way around the world just to pack a couple of tents (just, hah, well a couple of tents and 4,000 other little items) and head off to a Caravan park for a couple of days, but it is simply a wonderful time. Family, friends and a great environment, all the reasons that one comes home for in the first place really.

This year’s addition to the packing list was an inflatable boat so that my darling wife would be able to get just that bit further from the beach in her unrelenting efforts to extract tasty morsels from the sea. Admittedly, the crabs that she managed to get hold of (because in addition to the boat we some how ended up with a crab net as well) were indeed, very tasty morsels. But it did mean that I didn’t see much of her for the first couple of days. Between satisfying her own desire to fish and the kids as well (somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to get excited about it) there just wasn’t enough hours in the day to hang around the camp site doing nothing.

We were fortunate with the weather, meaning that the kids were able to play on the beach and even swim (bloody mad I say) and we with daylight savings having finished, we were able to eat at a reasonable hour and send them off to bed without too much in the way of reluctance and protestation. Which of course left us plenty of time to play cards and drink.

Add to that the opportunity to indulge in some good Aussie tucker like kitchener buns and meat pies and life was most grand indeed.

It was a great break and the only weather issue we had was on the night before our departure when the wind decided to start gusting and storm-strength intensity, threatening to collapse the tent on us. The tent survived, though the wind did manage to push the sand up under the fly of the tent and strain it through the fabric so that I was waking up every hour or so and dusting it out of my hair and off my pillow.

And of course with it continuing to blow maddeningly the following day, packing up was a bit of fun. We didn’t quite get around to folding our tents in any semblance of order, because it was just too hard to hold the bloody things down.

On the upside, it did remove last minute beach/fishing trips from the itinerary and we were ready to go in record time.

That left us with a couple of days back in Adelaide to track down a couple more friends, send kids all about town to catch up with their friends and even squeeze in some additional family time with my Aunty Carol having made a trip over from Melbourne to see us!

We probably didn’t have enough time to spend with everyone, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from my sojourn first in Singapore and subsequently here, it’s that no visit back home will be enough to satisfy everyone. Especially not us! The two weeks were over before I knew what was happening and it doesn’t seem real that we probably won’t manage to get home again before its time for us to depart these fair shores more permanently.

And thus we were headed back to the airport, every bag we owned stuffed to the point of exploding; mainly due to the desire to bring back enough Aussie treats to see us through as far as possible. If customs had stopped us and made us pile it up, I think I would have been ever so slightly embarrassed.

But despite the early hour of the day, we managed to get everyone to the airport in a timely manner and survived the always painful goodbyes that accompany that part of the journey. Off to Melbourne, where we had a nice smooth transfer before boarding the brand new Qantas A380 for LA.