The Waiting Game Monday 27th May - Brisbane to Dubai

There are lots of ways of calculating how long a journey like this really takes, and there’s plenty of time en route to let those numbers twirl in all sorts of permutations and combinations.  Waiting is after all, one of the joys of travel.   On this journey we have a ratio of about one waiting hour for every two in the air.

I usually like to calculate P2P or “pillow to pillow” - the time it’s taken from rising from one bed to sinking thankfully into another in some far distant corner of the world.    I will do that tomorrow, but it feels like cheating this time because we have been travelling thus far somewhat further forward in the aeroplane than is our custom.

The result of that is that in this one fourteen hour flight sector alone, the writer has managed to achieve a total amount of sleep equal to or greater than the total of all the sleep amassed on previous flights this decade and is desperately trying to become accustomed to NOT having the feeling of having just emerged from a washing machine on a spin cycle.  

For the first time in memory, the other of us is not asleep while we sit for the five hours it’s going to take for our next flight to depart, and it’s decidedly odd having someone to talk to.

Of course we'll miss you all. Sunday 26th May - Dicky Beach to Brisbane

 

Today we might have gone for a walk along the beach if we hadn't been so busy  squeezing an ever-growing list of last minute tasks into our schedule before our nine PM pickup.

After a long absence from our travels, we are a little out of practice, and perhaps as a consequence a little older.  So we've packed as lightly as we can, tidied as well as necessary, and launched ourselves in the direction of the big smoke.

Perhaps by the time you are reading this we will be blissfully asleep on an aeroplane whisking us through the night.  

Most likely we will be eating snacks and watching one of as many movies one can condense into twenty one hours of flying time, having declined the airline's kind offer of WiFi (when available) perhaps with some vague notion that we can recapture some of the romance of travel in a bygone age when sleep was deemed unnecessary.

We are not completely anti-technology of course.  This post was written yesterday in a haze of procrastination, and scheduled for now in the hope that romance of travel in a bygone age doesn't involve some last minute misadventure!

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Once more into the breach. Saturday 25th May - Dicky Beach

My father never explained why, but used to often remind me that "a boy should always carry a piece of string, a shilling and a pocket knife", and so it is that for going on three quarters of a century I have always followed part of that advice.   

I followed the bit about the pocket knife at least.  I have a small one on my key ring which is undoubtedly doomed like its predecessors to meet its end in an airport security bin on that one day I forget it's there, and a second, checked-luggage multi tool with pliers and longer blade in a leather pouch goes where ever we do.  This second knife is I think, an attempt to make up for the absence of the shilling and the penny.   

That knife, when it is not travelling on a boat or in a checked-in bag, has a home in the door pocket of the van and although I had a vague Idea that I'd got it out to stick in the bag, it's whereabouts were not apparent.

It seems that these days, a journey across the planet begins with at least two trips to visit the van, to pat it's little slumbering nose, ready loaded so it can be ready to take off at a moment's notice on our eventual return,  to retrieve a couple of things we'd forgotten we might need.

That knife it turned out was hiding, not in the van, but on my desk under the mound of papers that life in this paperless age dictates are necessary to travel across borders.   

The van resumed it's slumber, and with just one sleep to go until we depart, one of us sat about thinking about what he might need do next, printing eTickets and gathering paper, while the other simply got on with it, as is her way.