It’s a bit of a long story, but this was an impromptu trip taken at relatively short notice, and is subtitled “Operation Bring Maddie Home”.
Here is the backstory: MBW’s niece – Maddie – has permanent residency for Australia and is coming to live with us. The plan was that she would fly from Bulawayo Zimbabwe to Johannesburg, Johannesburg to Dohar, Dohar to Melbourne with a short stop-over at my sister’s house, then Melbourne to Brisbane. Then two weeks in hotel quarantine at the pleasure of the Premier of Queensland.
That was the plan, but as my friend Jack Reacher is known to say, a plan is only good until the first punch is thrown.
The “brief stop-over” in Melbourne became a bit of an epic journey with Maddie getting stuck in Melbourne for about a week and a half and subjected to multiple COVID tests, all while waiting for that elusive Queensland border pass.
In the end MBW and I decided that we would have a “mini-retirement” and go to Melbourne for several days to achieve a couple of things:
- Partly to give my long suffering sister and her family their lives back,
- Partly to get Maddie out of the house, and
- Partly to give us the chance of an unexpected roadtrip.
And you KNOW how much we love road trips.
So we booked our flights, booked a hire car – an MG SUV, and we booked an Airbnb at Wallace, out west of Melbourne towards Ballarat.
It’s been a while since we have flown anywhere – at least two years – and it all felt a bit new to us again.
I’d like to say that flying in a plane is a bit like riding on a bike, and that you never forget. OK so I know that the specific laws of physics that keep an aeroplane in the air are very different to the laws of physics that are essential in riding a bike … but I was speaking metaphorically. Possibly even philosophically.
In any case, we got to the airport and finally remembered the process for doing a bag drop and finding the gate, and eventually there we were waiting for our plane.
COVID is responsible for lots of things, and one of those things is that there are lots of police standing around waiting to intercept arriving passengers and ensure that they go to the appropriate home or hotel quarantine, as randomly interpreted by someone at the time.
And there they were – 4 or 5 boys (and girls) in blue all hanging around with enough guns, tasers, sprays and handcuffs to fight a small war. So I went over and spoke to them just to find out what we should expect when we return to Brisbane at the end of the week, only to be informed that they were “at the airport for an entirely different reason”.
Hmmm, sounds sinister.
It turns out that there were 4 or 5 of them at the airport – Gate 30 – to accompany a rather (as it turned out) unpleasant woman who was “being deported”, and ensure that she got on the plane. Once she was on the plane she became the problem of the Jetstar crew, and on arriving in Melbourne the Jetstar crew would then hand her over to – supposedly – a friend who would then take care of her from then on.
Fortunately or unfortunately she turned out to be sitting in the row in front of us, although thankfully on the other side of the aircraft. Listening to the cabin crew telling her their expectations of “behaving nicely” on the flight made interesting viewing, but other than that it was an uneventful flight.
Well, mostly uneventful. At one point during the flight we hit turbulence so bad that I thought we’d been shot out of the sky, and it was highly amusing watching the dude in front of us trying desperately to keep his half-glass of red wine inside his plastic cup where it belonged … and I think he was mostly successful.
We arrived at Melbourne around 6.20pm to bright sunshine, collected our checked bag and headed off to find the Thrifty car rental desk.
I had been harbouring a secret hope that the Thrifty peeps would get our car wrong and not give me an MG, but accidentally give me a Mercedes AMG … but alas that didn’t happen.
The MG is a fun little car with way too many options – “lane depart assist”, “rear crossover assist”, “parking assist”, “reversing assist”, “cruise control assist” … and so it goes on.
Despite too many options that just sound various warning alarms at various times, it appears that the people that built the car put the indicator stalk and the wiper stalk on the wrong sides of the steering column, so every time we go around a corner the wipers come on 🙁
We drove to my sister’s house at Coburg and managed to get there without colliding with a tram, without running over any pedestrians, without having to do one of those stupid hook turns in order to turn right from the left lane, and hopefully without getting any speeding tickets.
The MG has a 1.6 litre turbo-charged engine that I imagine is something like sitting in a rocket ship going into space. When you put your foot on the accelerator there is a whole lot of noise and rumbling but not much forward direction, and just when you think you are in trouble the turbo kicks in and you find yourself hurtling forward at a much greater speed than you anticipated.
It’s actually much like a Formula 1 car, except for the obvious differences – it can carry more than just the driver, it has boot space for suitcases, and you don’t need to wear a crash helmet.
By the magic of Daylight Saving Time we got to my sister’s house – after losing an hour of our lives – around 7.30pm which felt like 3.30 in the afternoon. A quick bite of dinner, coffee and a nice catch-up and we headed off to bed to let off some ZZZZZZs.
Let the road-trip begin first thing in the morning.
Ciao
#BringMaddieHome2021
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