The Joys of International Travel

Currently sitting in the lounge of Singapore airport, but only just….for ridiculously complicated reasons I ended up looking at the wrong schedule at home and booking a cab to Heathrow, but found myself sitting in the cab feeling increasingly uncomfortable. You know that feeling that something isn’t quite right? So eventually I opened my laptop and discovered that I was flying from Gatwick, and 15 minutes sooner than I had thought – I yelled at the driver to turn around fast (a bit useless as at that point we were stuck in a traffic jam). It turned out that the flight would close, and wait for no-one, at 8.30pm, and it was 7.40, a traffic jam, and we were 45 miles away. Stress. I managed to half check myself in on the phone, so that if I made it it would be faster to get through the airport. Thankfully, as holidays are approaching, London and the M25 were quite empty, and I got to Gatwick at the check-in at 8.26. But it wasn’t that simple, because my cello seat had been booked in all wrong! It had been booked in as a person, which meant, as we were going to Australia, that it had to have a passport and visa number next to it before it could be assigned a seat….I don’t even know how they sorted that, but it was something to do with faking handwritten boarding cards for the cello….and finally I was in my seat. It didn’t end there however, because for the Dubai/Singapore leg they had assigned my cello a middle seat (they have to have window seats as no-one can get past them), so there was general consternation and discussion and phone calls. Eventually they put the cello on the cupboard. So why did we have to go to the expense of buying an extra seat?
Anyway, now I’m at Singapore, have just refreshed in the shower, and am looking forward to the last leg of the journey to Brisbane! I love Australia! More soon…just noticed it says ‘last call’ on the board for Brisbane….