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September 29th (Day 1) was a very busy day! Getting up early and organizing the last minute things for my 3 month trip. Actually, its taken the best part of the last month getting things sorted! Preparing for a long trip like this takes a lot of planning. Booking the flights, booking accommodation, transferring money, getting travel visa’s, travel insurance, etc… the list goes on. All this might seem easy and individually look like small tasks, but in reality, all the small things add up. Getting my Philippine visa took 2 days in London for example.

Anyway, I digress, we got to the airport, checked-in, had coffee and my parents went on their way home. I was initially 2 Kgs overweight and that would have cost me £70! So I took out some goodies and all was ok-to-go. I flew from Manchester to London for the long hall flight to Sydney.

Unfortunately, the flight to Sydney was delayed 4.5 hours. We all got seated in the aircraft before a fault was discovered in engine number 3. After 1.5 hours, things were heating up! No air-con and the temp had risen to 30 degrees C. The pilot negotiated with Heathrow and we were all off. I was very impressed with the Qantas pilot. He kept us informed regularly about exactly what was happening. When we were all back in the departure lounge, a Qantas representative (looked like he may have been the co-pilot?) went to every single passenger and told them in person exactly what was happening and apologized. I’ve never seen this kind of attention to passengers ever when I’ve been on a delayed flight. Very impressed!!!!

The fault turned out to be an electronic controller for the bleed air system. Once this was replaced, all was good…

Day 2 was mostly sleeping during the flight. We stopped off in Bangkok for a few minutes before getting back on the aircraft and off to Sydney.

Day 3 was landing in Sydney. As the flight was delayed, it landed about 2 hours later than expected. Not too bad given how much the flight was delayed. However, this meant that my connecting fight to Melbourne was changed to depart at 10am (instead of 7:30am). Unfortunately, immigration and customs took over 2 hours and I missed my 2nd connecting flight. Immigration and customs was very tough! Nearly all my queue at immigration was sent for further questioning. I wasn’t, I went straight through… Customs was extremely tough!! I had to declare my asthma pumps (medicine) and the mints (food) I took from the refreshments on the aircraft. There was also notices that filming for an Australian TV show on border security was taking place.

The crew and service on the Qantas flights was superb!

Getting to Melbourne from Sydney was a little more problematic. As I had missed 2 connecting flights, getting a seat on another flight was difficult. There was exactly one seat left to get to Melbourne (at 4:30pm) for the whole day. My cousin Barry picked me up from the airport and we chatted all the way home. I’m glad to have finally got here and look forward to spending some quality time with family.