Ant n Nick's Sheep Luv Tour 2008 - Day One

Although this trip is only for a week and we are only going to Australia's seventh state (aka New Zealand) - because it is technically an "international trip" - so we might as well blog this on this site....

I have never had a strong desire to go to Sheep-Luv Land (aka NZ) - but Ant "thoughtfully" bought me some plane tickets last year for my birthday. (Does anyone remember the episode of the Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday and gets "Homer" engraved on the ball...?" (Anyway - I haven't bought Ant a birthday present yet for Feb so I should shut up now)...

Our flight from Canberra was a 6:45am flight - so that had meant we had to get up at the ungodly hour (on the ungodly day that is Easter Saturday) at 5am... Our taxi was 5 mins late - and Ant was about to call Canberra Cabs to complain - but the taxi appeared and we got in (despite the guy reaking of bad B.O and the meter was running before we set foot into the cab). The cab driver drove like "Crazy Taxi" - driving anywhere but the left hand lane at 40-50kms over the speed limit.

We checked in at the airport and made tracks to the Qantas Club - where we had breakfast and gorged ourselves stewpid.

We boarded our flight - and did a lot of sitting around on the tarmac... After about 1/2 an hour of this - the plane turned around and headed back to the terminal. Ant picked up on this fact before they announced that they were having "technical difficulties" and had to check something out. We sat around at the gate for another 15 minutes before saying that had to cancel the flight and we had to rebook onto another one.

Everyone poured off the flight (which was half-full thankfully). A stream of people made their way back to the Qantas Club (where I had noticed I had split youghurt onto my shirt earlier) and Ant did his magic with the Qantas Club lady to ensure that we were going to get onto the next flight to Sydney (because we were on a LAN Chille flight to Auckland on a separate ticket or something).

After about 10 minutes of waiting around in the Qantas Club (Ant had befriended some guy who was flying to Peru to do the Inca Trail... cancelled flights... Peru... sounds familiar??!) - the Qantas Door B%%ch announced that everyone had to go back down to the "arrival hall" and collect their bags and recheck onto the next flight... We then all marched outside and collected our bags (thank god we only had to wait 5 minutes instead of the usual 30 minutes at Canberra Airport) - and I raced over to the check in line (pushed a few grannies out of my way) - and we managed to get checked into the next Dash 8 flight to Sydney...

I managed to get "explosive trace searched" for the second time going thru security again... We walked back to the Qantas Club (our third time today) and plonked down in front of the Foxtel TV - feeling rather exhausted (sad given the lack of distance we have travelled thus far).

As soon as we sat down - we noticed it was the final call for our flight to Sydney. It was one of those new Dash-8 bug smashers - a little bit bigger than those regular bug smashers to sydney. The plane was chockers - and Ant and I had to sit separately. I was next to some dumb kiwi guy and Ant was seated next to some old grannie. The flight was fairly bumpy and I felt a little off...

2 b continued....