Coming home Saturday to Monday

View from the 9th floor at the Park Royal Hotel, overlooking Tullamarine

Almost sunset on the road to West Launceston. I missed this view

It's Monday morning, the first day of Winter in Australia, and I'm sitting in our 9th floor room at the Park Royal Hotel at Melbourne Airport overlooking the airport activity.   It's surprisingly quiet up here, despite the busyness of the airport. I can see clear over the terminus to the runways from here and am surprised how flat the area surrounding Tullamarine is from this perspective. 
Looking directly down at the road,  it seems that every other vehicle is a yellow taxi, dropping off passengers. People are rugged up in winter hats and coats, which is a very marked contrast to the skimpy outfits we encountered in the South of France.  Was it only two days ago?  And whatever happened to Sunday? 
Our trip home started on Saturday morning when we were collected from the Radisson Blu at midday.  We were at the airport in no time as it was just down the road.  Naturally check in didn't open until 1pm, so we queued until we could lodge our bags and have our seating taken care of.  My last job was to find the VAT refund kiosk and set off with another lady from the ship. Though it was ultimately successful, it didn't go smoothly.  We had trouble finding it in the first place as it was at the other end of the terminal, the automatic kiosk scanner didn't work, so we had to have our paperwork processed manually.  We'd been warned we had to have the articles purchased on our person, but the official who stamped our forms didn't even ask. Of course, if I'd NOT had it on me he'd have asked to see it.  Then we had to find the letter box to post it.  Naturally it was hidden around a corner.   I felt very pleased with myself once that was finally out of the way.  Next, all we had to do was kill the next three hours.

On the suggestion of our Travel Agent, we'd booked ourselves into the Riviera VIP Lounge at Nice aiport  to ease our waiting time to wait for our flight.  The seats were marginally more comfortable than the regular gate seats and there was access to light snacks and drinks, so it was probably worth it.
Our return home was broken into three flights:  Nice to Dubai, which was 6.5 hours, then two hours on the ground,   Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, another 6 hours then one hour on the ground, then reboarded the same plane for the last leg: KL to Melbourne - another 6.5 hours.  Strangely, we arrived around midnight at two of our ports:  Dubai and Melbourne, so our entire Sunday flying over the Middle East and Asia.

Three standout memories from the trip:
1 I accidentally left my Kindle behind on a gate seat in Nice. Thankfully I realised this as soon as I took my seat in the aircraft so I notified the cabin crew - who pulled a few strings and managed to retrieve it for me!  Boy was I lucky.  This is my Kindle's second narrow escape.  The first was in Germany two years ago-when I left it on a seat at a fountain and someone in our party found it and returned it to me.
2  When we arrived in Dubai, we had to be taken by bus to the terminus  The drive seemed to go on and on.  It was quite strange standing at the top of the steps of the aircraft and wondering who had  turned on the blast heating.   The temperature was probably still in the mid 30s  - even at midnight.  All I can say is that we were glad the bus had really powerful AC.
3 The aircraft for our first and last legs had spare seats so we had a row of four seats to ourselves.  Bliss!  The middle leg: the one where we really wanted to sleep, was full though, and it was nearly impossible to make ourselves comfortable.  I slept best of all on the last leg, not even bothering with the inflight movies available, used my eye mask and slept on and off the entire flight.

We arrived in Melbourne shortly after midnight last night - far too late to fly onto Tasmania.  We had booked ourselves into the Park Royal which is literally across the street from the airport.   It was great to be able to push our luggage trolley across the elevated pedestrian walkway straight into the hotel and be checked in in no time at all.

We were almost too tired to sleep, but the combination of a long hot shower and a wonderfully soft bed, sorted that out very quickly.
Our flight to Launceston doesn't leave until the early afternoon, so we have some time here to have some breakfast - or whatever meal seems appropriate for our body clocks right now - read a local paper, put our local SIM cards back in our phones - and repack our bags for the trip back across Bass Strait.  Even though we have obtained an additional luggage allowance, we still have to reduce our carry on baggage by one piece.  The airline is a bit funny about that. 

Monday night.
We lodged our luggage with the airline with only a mild rebuke for not having it evenly distributed across the  three bags, but our trip home was short and sweet (compared with what we'd just endured).  A taxi ride home had us at home by half past two and Nick was already home from work.  I was really pleased when he told us he'd made a big pot of spag bol for our tea tonight. 

We spent the next few hours unpacking and dividing the spoils, as it were - before I checked that my car was still working and took Vaughan to his place. 
It's now 10.30pm and I'm in my favourite chair watching TV,  and it feels great to be home.   The TV is on but so is the heater.  Brrr.  Most of our baggage has been unpacked and a load of laundry put through the washer.   I've opened all the mail ( but not read it)  and tossed out the junk.  I've quailed at the sight of the newspapers piled up for me to read, but I shall tackle them over the next few days.  What I'm really looking forward to integrating my purchases into the house - and seeing how they look, that and giving folk their gifts.

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