day two

5th February 2011 - 10:00am

Ok. Well, I was ready for my flight to Darwin, but apparently my flight to Darwin wasn’t ready for me…

I managed to fill in the rest of the afternoon at Melbourne airport by having a bit of a walk around and finishing off my Marie Claire magazine that my work mates gave me. At around 6:30, half an hour before my scheduled departure, there was a last minute gate change. So I made my way to gate 8. Where the plane hadn’t arrived from the previous flight. Hmm. This was obviously going to be interesting, given I only had 35 minutes changeover time in Brisbane to get to my connecting flight.

Who knows what time the plane actually left because I wasn’t wearing a watch, but the new arrival time in Brisbane was 9:00pm, instead of 8:10pm. As those of you who worked with me at Menzies will know, I’m probably the best person in our lab at doing calculations. And with those amazing maths skills, I calculated that I would be 15 minutes late for the connecting flight to Darwin. But I wasn’t worried, because they’d made it quite clear when I cracked it at them when I had to change my Hobart-Melbourne flight, that because it was a connecting flight the plane would wait for us.

I’m not quite sure what Virgin Blue’s definition of wait is, but I guess maybe the plane did wait. As the plane I was on taxied into gate 40, our plane was leaving gate 41. So at least they waited so we could see our plane leaving without us. Knowing this was the last plane out of Brisbane to Darwin for the night, I was guessing that I would be having a sleepover in Brisbane.

There were 12 of us that missed the flight, including the lovely couple that sat next to me during the flight from Melbourne to Brisbane, Sandy and Rick. They were heading to Darwin for five days, although it should’ve been a few weeks, but the company they were touring with went broke, and they lost their money. So as if it wasn’t bad enough that their trip was cut short anyway, now they missed another night in Darwin! But Virgin Blue were actually pretty good to us, putting us up for the night in the Hotel Grand Chancellor and giving us a $50 FOOD voucher for dinner (to use in the restaurant that was closed – although they did order us Dominoes pizza). I write food in capitals because it was made quite clear that we couldn’t spend the $50 on top shelf grog. Spewin. They also gave us transfers to and from the hotel, and since the next flight to Darwin wasn’t until Saturday afternoon with Virgin, they upgraded us to Qantas. Woohoo! More leg room, food, tea and coffee, nicer staff. And even better, on a basically empty plane! I could’ve had a whole row of seven seats to myself! We had to sit in our allocated seats to start with though, and I met a lovely lady from Darwin who I was having a chat to about my move to the middle of nowhere. She said I’ll have a great time.

So now I’m on the plane, about to get back to reading ‘Richo’, and only a few hours away from finally getting to see Ben again! And only four hours after that we’ll be heading to Bali for three nights. We’ll probably spend those four hours sitting at the bar enjoying some of the last few drinks I’ll be having for quite a while…