Day 1 Sunday 27th Oct

Getting there.

It has been a long time since I wrote anything on my blog. But I think that heading off to Australia and New Zealand makes it worth restarting.

We have been invited to Diane’s cousin’s wedding in Margaret River next Saturday (2nd Nov). That is the reason for the trip. But, we weren’t coming all this way just for the wedding and to fly home the next day. So we planned a trip around it.

Today is hopefully the boring part. A sixteen hour flight from London to Perth.

The clocks went back, giving us about an hour longer in bed than usual. But, we were still up pretty early. The car arrived at 08:15 to take us to Heathrow for our flight which was leaving at 11:50. No hassles other than the normal queues at security.  We were on our way.

We are now about six and a half hours into the flight, somewhere over Afghanistan. We had lunch. I read my book for a while but started to doze off. I decided that a sleep was a good idea. I did sleep for a while. It is six in the afternoon UK time, I am awake again.

Day 2 .. or is it Day 1 continued.

We are now in Australia. We spent sixteen hours on an airplane with not a lot of sleep. Diane had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. A rather lovely Australian doctor named Clair helped us. Her five-month-old son was also with her. Thanks to them, it eventually stopped.

We were met by a pre-booked car (thank you, Audley Travel), which made getting to the hotel quite painless. The hotel, Qt Perth, is pleasant, slightly upmarket and close to the centre of the city. We dumped our bags on the floor and ourselves on the bed. I think we were overtired. We couldn’t get to sleep. Instead, we had a shower and went out to explore the local area.

We wandered down to the waterfront through a forest of steel and glass office blocks. In some ways, they were quite impressive. But, they could have been in any business district in any city in the world.

Wandering along the waterfront as the sun was setting was very enjoyable. We found a micro-brewery and stopped. We had a beer; it would have been rude not to. Then we carried on our walk into the sunset.

We thought about eating at the brewery, but decided that we would eat at the hotel for tonight.

We went back to the hotel, changed, because the restaurant is moderately posh and had a pleasant Italian meal. We finished the evening with a night cap in the hotel’s rooftop bar.

After that we went to bed and straight to sleep.