Rejser helvede

I’ve been neglecting this blog of late because we have been on an all too brief and very hectic trip back to Australia. Given that 90 percent of people who read this blog do so under some sense of familial or friendly obligation, we probably just saw you. Apologies if you have heard all this already.

We learned quite a few valuable lessons on our first jaunt home, the first of which is make sure you are prepared to spend more time than expected anywhere you have a layover. We made it to London without drama, but things went swiftly awry after that. Our flight to Hong Kong got stuck on the tarmac with an electrical fault. Cruelly, they let us all get three quarters of the way through a movie before calling it quits and disembarking everyone. We made it to the airport hotel at 2.30am, with a bag of M&S millionaire flapjacks but no phone chargers or onward flight.

The next morning it was back to Heathrow – which at this point was our favourite place in the whole world – to wait in a queue for another few hours. Around midday we finally got ourselves on a flight… that left at 9.30pm. So, in the interests of making the best of it, we headed into the city for our ‘bonus’ holiday in London. A lone silver lining in the whole experience was being able to get to an exhibition that we missed seeing while in London the other weekend. Small victories!

Of course, this jaunt was only a brief respite before we were back to the airport. We were basically Tom Hanks in that movie where he lives in the airport, which I have never seen and now don’t need to see because I have lived it first hand.

We finally got on a plane again, only an entire day later than planned, and I got some closure on the damn movie I was part way through the previous night (spoiler: it was Brooklyn and the ending was extremely lame and unsatisfying and did not deserve to be experienced as a 24 hour cliffhanger – two stars).

En route to Singapore a part of me was clearly trying to work out how this experience could be made any worse, and eventually came up with an ingenious plan to get food poisoning just in time for the final leg of the journey. It was the worst.

Eight hours of misery later, we finally landed in Sydney. Not even the stormageddon-rainpocalypse that awaited us upon arrival could dampen our joy at being somewhere other than an airport or plane.

Once in Sydney, we learned that all subsequent trips should be longer than two weeks, and not in winter ever again. It was so lovely seeing everyone that we did see, but upsetting to miss seeing so many more people due to scheduling impossibilities.

As much as we are liking Danish life, I must admit there are some things that you only get down under, like access to abundant Asian food and views like this:

Also signs like this:

And most of all the quality journalism in the Daily Terrorgraph:

Happily, we did not get eaten by a SHAAARK! at any point during our holiday and had a mercifully uneventful journey home.