Somewhere over South Australia I woke up (again) just as we were about to make a big left turn, catch the jet stream, and land in Sydney in a very short time indeed.

Breakfast was being served, but it was still dark. With the toilets right behind us it wasn’t too hard to work out a good time to get up and go, which I rather needed to. I don’t sleep that well while flying, and they bring past a tray of water or orange juice about every half hour because the air conditioning is so dry. I think the longest I was asleep in a block was maybe two hours.

We were on the left side of the plane, and had a little peek out the window, although everybody in the plane was still officially ‘asleep’. It was dark but edging towards twilight. We were flying towards the sun; less then 10 minutes later sunrise had finished, and we floated above soft white clouds.

The wind was behind us and we sat cheerfully in our seats, counting down the minutes to an early landing in Sydney. Underneath the clouds it was raining a little bit, and we came in from the North, over Glebe and Ultimo, and played ‘Spot Your Old Apartment’ from a low altitude.

Is the Harbour Bridge and Opera House a magnificent and welcoming sight as you descend? Yes.

We wondered what our apartment had been doing without us. Had it been lonely? Had it coped in our long absence?

The landing was easy but bought the predictable cheer, because a lot of people on that plane were right about to be stuck in Thailand for a while until Qantas put on extra flights out of Phuket.

Next thing was to turn your phone back on and tell everyone we were home and on dry land; answer a few phone calls and then hit the Duty Free shop for GIN!

We must have landed at the exact right time because there were no lines (at all) for either the Australian Passport or International Section of Customs, and we had our choice of eight different desks.

Pick up your luggage from the carousel (it all came through this time), get in a taxi, find out from the driver if we missed anything at all in politics (we didn’t), and then past many familiar sights to Broadway Shopping Centre, where Simon and Adrian had come to collect us. We bought pictures frames with the voucher Alice had been given by Gadfly when she left, and also had a slight problem wherein the tax driver didn’t have change for a fifty and she nearly got run over crossing the road to get change from her Dad. Who didn’t have any, but her brother did.

The drive home was unremarkable; we spent half of it asleep, and by 3pm were back in Bathurst, unpacking our bags and just sitting in the yard, feeling rested.

Greg

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