AUSTRALIA BOUND

After a lot of anticipation, waiting and mucking around the day finally arrived when we were to leave for Australia.


A problem that confronted us was how to get to Vancouver airport. The car was too small to fit us all in, to catch a flight to Vancouver we would have to travel to Kelowna which is 100k’s away and the car issue would present itself again. We tried to hire a car but all the local car companies wouldn’t do one-way hires. We looked at the Greyhound bus and that was somewhat viable, though the usual 4 hour plus trip would turn into 7 plus hours and a lot of bus changing.
A conundrum indeed!

In the end a friend of ours Ramona came through and offered to drive us to the airport.
It was a flurry of activity in the last hours as we did the final packing and made sure that the house was in order. So at around midday we all piled into Ramona’s van and headed off to Vancouver airport.

Now one thing we hadn’t added to our calculations was that Monday, 02 August was the British Columbia Day public holiday. The traffic to the town of Merritt was heavier than usual and we pulled off there to get gas. Big mistake! The town was gridlocked with vehicles; the lineup to get gas was 10 or more cars long in every station. The fast food joints were packed. So a stop that should have been a short one quickly turned into a long one.
Once on the road again we noticed more and more traffic and we halted to a crawl when we were more than 150k’s from Vancouver alarm bells started to toll. That first bumper to bumper stall was the result of an accident but the closer we got the more frequent the stops began. Mild panic started to set in.
Tammie started to work the phone to find a solution and she did. She arranged for a local cab company to meet us at a designated point just off the highway. The cab had the local knowledge to get us all to the airport much quicker than Ramona could use what little local knowledge we all had.
The cab was waiting as we pulled up and we quickly transferred all of our bags and set off. True to the cabbies word he had us at the airport in 40 minutes which was 70 minutes before our flight. We all piled out of the cab and made our way to check-in. It was there that Cameo realized that she had left her laptop in the cab. Damn!!
Tammie made a flurry of phone calls to try and track the cabbie down. Initially she had no luck.


Check-in went smoothly enough but security was a nightmare, it was the most stringent security check I have ever gone through anywhere in the world and it included a full body scan with one of the newly introduced body-scanning machines.

Finally we were all done and made our way through US Immigration, which I always find strange that you pass through US Immigration on Canadian soil and once through you are in the USA even though you are still in Vancouver Airport.
Whilst waiting to board our United flight to San Francisco Tammie received the news that the laptop had been located and would be held at the taxi company office. It was nice to receive some positive news for a change.
The flight to San Francisco was full and none of us sat together. We had a very short layover in San Francisco before boarding our 747 flight to Sydney at 2310. This flight was fully booked and we were lucky to get a row of four seats together. The first shock was that there were no individual entertainment systems in the seats, something that I haven’t experienced in any international airline for the past four years. Oh well we would have to put up with long-range viewing of whatever they served up.


The flight was okay and we were in darkness for the entire 14 hour duration We slept fitfully through the flight and arrived at Sydney blurry eyed at just after 6 am in the morning.


The adventure had begun!