Homeward Bound - The Third Leg - Singapore to Melbourne

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This blog should be done by now as we were due back in Melbourne at 9.50pm on Sunday night. Unfortunately, following our unexpected diversion to Singapore, we didn’t touch down in Melbourne until just before 4.00am this morning.

Poor Kerry had to drag herself out of bed to come to pick us up because we didn’t have any house keys on us. When Kerry picked us up to take us to the airport three weeks ago we all agreed that we didn’t need to carry house keys half way around the world and back because Kerry would pick us up on our return and let us in. Ha, ha, if we had known how things would pan out we would have taken a set of house keys with us and then we could have taken a cab from Tullamarine to Preston and Kerry could have had an undisturbed night of sleep. Lesson learnt for next time, eh?

Bernie’s bag was circulating on the baggage carousel soon after we arrived in the baggage hall. Unfortunately, we had to wait for ages before my bag put in an appearance. With both bags retrieved we made towards the Customs gates and discovered that the wheels on my bag had been stuffed up in transit. Damn it! Despite putting our bags into the special ‘soft luggage’ baggage drop at Manchester Airport the system has still bashed my bag about somewhere along the way and now its wheels don’t go so good anymore. Oh well, I’ve been thinking about a hard shell case with four spinner wheels for a while now becasue we have NEVER backpacked our stupid soft wheelie bags that can be converted to backpacks. Now I will HAVE to have a new bag. I can keep an eye out for a really good special. With no trips currently planned, I may well have plenty of time to watch for a good deal.

We ticked ‘yes’ to having been around farms because quite a few of the National Trust/English Heritage properties incorporated or were located adjacent to farmland. I did pat a cow somewhere along the line. Anyhow, the pre-check, checker asked why we had ticked ‘yes’. We only got half way through explaining and she told us to go straight on through. They do say if you’re not sure you should tick ‘yes’, but then they don’t seem to appreciate the fact that you have exercised caution and left the decision up to them.

We made our way across to the Parkroyal Hotel where we met Kerry and loaded our bags into he car. We had to stop briefly at her place to pick up Finbar because she had been around to collect him last night when we let her know that we wouldn’t be home last night. We managed to fit us, our luggage and Finbar into the Mazda 3 ... just. Finbar was bit ‘meh’ about us being home. Maybe it was being taken around to Kerry’s after three weeks of being dog sat and then pacing about most of the night there rather than settling down that had him a bit discombobulated? Ah well, we were happy to see him!

Home at last about 5.00am. Should we go to bed or not? It was still dark so we decided to grab a few hours sleep. Bernie teed up with his boss to work at home so he wanted to log on by about 9.00-ish. Regardless, we didn’t want to sleep all day because we wanted to get our body clocks aligned with AEST sooner rather than later. We managed to get ourselves out of bed at 9.00am and then stay awake until after dinner time.

Now that we were finally home after our looooong journey I did a rough calculation of just how long we had been in transit. I worked out that between 2.00pm GMT until 4.00am AEST it was about 30 hours. Roughly 27 of those hours were spent inside an aeroplane and about 20 of those hours were in one stretch! Even more if you consider that boarding starts 40 minutes before the scheduled departure time. They’ve been advertising that non-stop flights from Perth to London are now available and that Melbourne to London is likely in the foreseeable future. Until this weekend I didn’t think I could face that, but now I think, maybe I could??!

We’ve had another great holiday, but there really his no place like home!



Steps: 19,381 (14.65 kms)

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