Day 97 – Melbourne to Perth – Anyone want an I-Phone?Oct 26, 2009
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It had only been a couple of days ago that we flew in but it was already time to reverse the process. After dropping off the car and breathing a sigh of relief that it had not fallen apart or self destructed during the time we had it we attempted to check in.
So we did what Qantas recommend and used the web check in process and then lined up for the “Quickcheck bag drop” - a little misnomer here as I cannot see which part of standing in a 50 person long line to drop off your bags is quicker. To make things worse because it took so long, they needed to take people out of the line if their flight was about to leave, which only managed to slow down everyone else.
Helpfully there was someone there with a clipboard measuring the times it took specific people to check in.
On the flight was a repeat of the first flight. Aaron grumbled, wriggled, fell asleep for half the flight and then repeated the original behavior. I enjoyed watching the woman sitting in the seat next to Al. Every time Az made a noise she put her headsets on, she wore a look on her face all flight like she had sucked a lemon, especially when she got bumped by Az moving. I would have more sympathy for her if she wasn’t 400+kgs and taking up half of Al’s seat. That poor seat had one full and 2 half people in it.
For his part Ev settled in and played with the kids pack. His classic comment was as we started the take off roll. Where you would expect a little person to get upset by the loud noise and the vibrations, Evan reclined in his chair and said……”Here we go. Sit back and relax”. He is 4 going on 25.
The flight crew was great, particularly with the boys, plenty of kids packs, keeping meals for Ev and basically anything we needed. Not often I say good things about Qantas crews on full flights but they were very good.
Back in the (wild?) west we picked up ‘Mater’ (and a large bill for the service) and came back to the van park and set up again. It looked like Perth had some rain as the dirt on the van has moved. 90% of it is still there but it has just been re arranged a little. Nice that basically the only rain the van has seen was when we were in another state….Sweet.
But then the rain started again. For the first time on the trip we actually got rain today while we were not asleep or in the car….very inconvenient. We tried to arrange Aaron’s passport (for NZ in December) but we did not have the 538 forms signed in triplicate by 247 church ministers of not less than 123 different denominations. Gotta love Australia Post! So they could not process the application.
While we were having this argument with Aus post I got a text message from a friend in Sydney letting me know my hotmail account was spamming the world. Turns out my hotmail account had been hacked into. Whoever did it had deleted all of the mail in my inbox and folders, and (as you probably know) sent everyone in my address book an offer for an I-Phone. To make it worse they deleted all the addresses in my address book so that I couldn’t contact anyone to let them know it was spam!!! Not happy at all!!!!!!!!! 9 years of mail and addresses gone.
It is particularly annoying as all of the protections on my laptop are up to date. It must have been compromised when I used another PC, but where and when? My apologies for anyone who got the spam. Let me state the obvious. Don’t open it and don’t trust anything that looks suspicious from that address. I will not send links or attachments for a while from that address.
After a less than stellar afternoon we did the only thing possible….we went to a couple of wineries, specifically the Swan valley. Walking into the first winery we knew we were unlikely to think much of the wine. They had Fremantle Dockers memorabilia on the wall. We were right, pretty lousy wine.
The second winery (Lancaster) was the opposite, no not West Coast Eagles , a very good winery. It was in an open shed in the vineyards, and had a very good range of wines. Evan amused himself by running through the wet trees and vines, much to the amusement of the Korean golfers that were there (don’t ask, I don’t know why) and we reused Aarons backpack to keep him amused. I may have looked like a goose but he can’t grab the glass from back there. We are going to re-use that idea.
7 bottles later (in the car, not us) we wandered out much more positive than we entered. More positive is a good enough euphemism for inebriated isn’t it? We will tackle the rest of the swan valley in a few days time.
Back to the van park for a BBQ dinner and an early night. The body clock is still a bit haywire.
