Melbourne to Singapore

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Well, we were up at our usual time this morning (maybe even a little earlier) even though it was the first day of our holidays! We headed off while it was still foggy … and dark to take the dogs for one last walk before going on holidays without them for six weeks. They were thrilled to pieces to be taken for a much longer than usual morning walk, little did they know that their mum and dad would soon be leaving them behind!

After our walk we had breakfast and showered and did a little bit of housework to put the house in order for Kerry who will be looking after the house and dogs for us until the beginning of July.
We packed the car and started heading for the airport on schedule at 10.30am. Bernie’s mobile rang just as we drove onto the Monash Freeway. I answered and explained that Bernie was driving and suggested that if it was a work call the caller should call someone else as Bernie had started his holiday. The caller advised me that he knew that Bernie was on holidays, but was ringing him to interview him for the EL1 selection exercise currently being conducted. Bernie was very naughty and ended up talking on the phone while driving to tee it up that Peter would call him back at 1.00pm to allow us time to get to Tullamarine and check our bags in.

After that excitement, the plan was to ring Kerry on her mobile to let her know that we were on our way so that she could meet us in Thornbury and drive us to the airport. The only problem was that Kerry wasn’t answering her mobile!! After a few tries we decided to leave it for five or ten minutes and then try our luck again. Before we had the chance though, Kerry called back to apologise for leaving her phone on her desk unattended for a few minutes! So, we were back on track to meet Kerry at her house.

We were in Thornbury just before 11.30am and at the airport by about 11.50am. We handed the keys to the car over to Kerry and she headed off back to work and we dragged our bags into the airport. We were WAY early for our flight with check in not even open yet! Even so we were not the first in the queue. It doesn’t seem to matter how early we are, we have never yet been first in line to check in.

We checked our bags in without any problems although we were a bit taken aback by how much they weighed. The standard limit is now 23kg and our Qantas Club membership entitles us to 30kg so we weren’t over our limit, but both of us thought that we had tried to pack very frugally so we were disappointed to have cracked 20kg each. To be honest we weighed in at 25kg each!! Bernie’s excuse is that he has all the electrical cords and chargers in his bag. My excuse is that all the maps and guide books are packed in my bag plus I had some extra books and paperwork that I had volunteered to deliver to people’s relatives in England. The main thing is that we weren’t repacking our bags at the check in counter like the couple before us!

Being so early we didn’t have to queue anywhere. We went straight through the immigration counter and then Bernie was the only person at the Tourist Refund Scheme counter to claim the tax back on the compact camera that we purchased recently. It was really quiet in the duty free shops so I purchased my traditional holiday Swatch without any trouble. With all of the pre-flight stuff done by about 12.45pm we could head into Qantas Club to relax until flight time.

Well, I could relax in Qantas Club, while Bernie did a phone interview!!!! Which, of course, is just the way that you want to start an international holiday experience. Not! So, while I ate soup and sandwiches and biscuits and cheese, Bernie spent 40 minutes on the phone telling the interviewers about three initiatives that he has introduced that support his claims for the position of Client Service Centre Manager. After the interview Bernie was straight into the Heinekens! Bernie felt like he went OK, but has to wait to hear from them next week. As it is an assessment centre exercise the next step will be a psychometric test that they will email to him to complete while on leave. If he gets through that he will still have to have a face-to-face interview - probably within the first couple of days that he is back at work!! Talk about great timing for a selection exercise.

In a rather bizarre coincidence our friends Russell and Joanne were also traveling on flight QF9 today so they joined us in Qantas Club for pre-flight drinks before the flight boarded at around 3.00pm. The Qantas staff had us all loaded pretty quickly and we pulled away from the terminal only about five minutes after our scheduled flight time of 3.30pm.

We experienced a bit of turbulence over central Australia, but had an otherwise smooth and uneventful flight. I managed to catch up on three movies that I hadn’t seen; ‘Dean Spanley’, ‘Doubt’ and ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’. I wasn’t sure if I could stay awake for the third movie so chose one that I figured I wouldn’t be disappointed if I missed the end hence the ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’ selection!! Bernie watched ‘Inkheart’ and a Hong Kong police drama. Just quietly, I’m not sure how much he saw of the Hong Kong one because it seemed to me that he was watching it with his eyes closed!?

When we arrived in Singapore the ground staff were telling passengers continuing on QF9 to London to go straight away to the gate lounge as we would be re-boarding in half an hour. Russell and Joanne were changing to another flight for their ongoing journey to Heathrow and they were not scheduled to leave until after midnight. We decided that even if it took us 15 minutes to find the Qantas Club lounge and we had to turn straight around to walk back to the gate we might as well head that way for a bit of a leg stretch. In the end the four of us enjoyed the hospitality in Qantas Club for about 50 minutes before QF9 was called. They had us loaded again pretty efficiently and back in the air about five minutes after the scheduled departure time of 11.05pm.

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[Wayne]

Dogs
The Dogs Look Like They Are Having a Great Time