So, I arrived back in Vienna on the afternoon of Sunday 11th as an unemployed person. Monday I went back to the office to collect mail (mostly bills) and learned that I re-start work on May 3 and will be off to Namibia the following Monday on a 3 day mission!
Anyway a couple of days to relax and do the washing (and for the cleaning lady to do the ironing) made a welcome break...............and a chance to get ready for Australia.
So Thursday 15th it was downstairs at 0615 to get in the car and head back to Vienna Airport for the early morning British Airways flight to London.
The new BA lounge at Vienna was very nice ; quiet and not crowded with good coffee and croissants in the morning. The BA flight was fine and we arrived a bit early at Heathrow. I called Clare to say I had got so far OKand then I heard about the ASH for the first time. There had been no news at Vienna and none on the flight so when I heard that all airports north of Birmingham were closed. I was more than a little apprehensive when I got to the transfer desk to get my onward boarding passes for the two QANTAS legs to Singapore and Perth. The good news at the desk was that I had been successful in my request for an upgrade to First class on the Airbus 380 to Singapore; the better news was that we were going to leaving at least one hour early; the not so good news was the British airspace would be closing at about the same time. The First Class lounge was good at Terminal 4 Heathrow and I had a drink and tried to read papers and the internet to learn all about the Icelandic volcano erruption and what was happening. Soon enough it was time to board and enter the wholly unreal world of my First Class suite on the A380. Quite an amazing set up with a swivelling seat that becomes an (almost) flat bed, a TV screen about 21" across, lots of little tables and storage spaces and even a guest seat so I could share dinner with a friend. You can see it all in the pictures on the QANTAS website although they do not really do it justice. One sits in a sort of self contained cubicle and it is very nice.
We left London 17 minutes before the airspce was closed which was pretty damn tight timing. Some of the sircraft behind us on the taxiway may not have been allowed to leave we were told.
The flight was great naturally, with Penfold's St. Henri to drink with the lovely lunch and Dom Perignon champagne as a welcome drink, an aperiitif and at any time you felt like it! Good movies, super service, wonderful food and a comfortable bed. Breakfast before Singapore was lovely too.
In Singapore the news from Europe was all poor when it came to air travel, so we had obviously been very lucky to be able to leave when we did.
Anyway I was soon off to fly on to Perth and arrived a little early and was soon settled into the Criterion Hotel on Hay Street. A central location , a reasonable 3 star place with free internet in the room, a good cafe and a fair bottle shop; only one block from all the shoping action in the pedestrian centre of town, opposite a free bus stop for transport to the bus station from where it was another free bus ride to the flying at South Perth.
The flying was exciting with lots of action on both days, plenty of plyon strikes which is unusual.
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