(Posted 7-Nov-2007; backdated to the day it happened. Sorry, some of the best pics are on the video, which I haven’t had time to sort out yet.)

With last year’s trip to Sydney very much the model for this year’s little jaunt, we set out on Saturday morning. Train (on-time this time) then the Skybus to the airport. This time Virgin Blue got the gong for the best deal on flights, so we checked-in then dropped off the bag.

The video on the Skybus had mentioned a ban on liquid containers on planes, with the implication that our big opaque water bottles (all three promotional give-aways from banks) would be seized by airport security and disposed of in a controlled explosion (or something like that). So I’d emptied them out and put them in the checked luggage. Of course, this left us paying $3 for a bottle of water inside the terminal… ah well. We also bought gum, traditional attempted remedy to the ear problems when ascending and descending (though I’m not convinced it helps that much).

After Marita spotted Max Walker in Mildura airport last week, I was on the lookout for celebrities. I didn’t spot any, though I did see an ex-girlfriend and (I think) her sister boarding a flight to Sydney. We had a quick couple of goes at the Simpsons pinball machine (annoyingly quick, in fact) before boarding.

The flight was fine; on-time, no annoying neighbour passengers, and the lady making the announcements was cracking jokes that weren’t excessively lame. We munched through a Toblerone and the kids were kept interested by the back-of-the-seat display showing the plane’s location, altitude and speed. (Could’ve bought a bunch of Foxtel channels for $5 per seat, but it didn’t seem worth it for such a short flight.)

We landed and got to walk across the tarmac like rock stars. I adjusted the time on my phone, then we picked up our baggage. While we waited, someone else’s suitcase fell off the carousel taking a sharp corner. Nobody else seemed to notice it, so we put it back on, so whoever owned it (obviously waiting out-of-sight of it) wouldn’t be standing there all day waiting.
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