Departure Day
Background
Last year, Andy was sitting in the car ready to go at 11am (even though our flight didn’t depart until 5pm). This year was a little different.
I had a last minute work trip to Tokyo. I’m not a frivolous work traveller. I really needed to be there. The only problem was that I needed to be there the day before we left for South America.
There was one flight that got me back to Sydney in plenty of time for my flight to Santiago. There was another flight which cut it close as a back-up plan. There was even a back-up plan if the back-up plan didn’t work.
But the travel gods were with me. My meeting ended on time and my team put me in a taxi for the airport. I arrived to the lounge with plenty of time to spare. I texted Andy to say all was going to plan and I’d see him (and all of my luggage) first thing in the morning at Sydney airport. Nighty night.
Then my phone buzzed about 30 minutes later. It wasn’t Andy. It was Qantas. There was a delay. Shit.
The worst part of it was that there was no information in the text. Just that there is a delay. I took a deep breath, gathered my carry-on luggage, and headed to the front desk to learn more. Deep breath. Plenty of time for plan B, and worst case, plan C (which has Andy travelling with all our luggage and without me, and me arriving a day later). As it turned out, the delay was because there was a tailwind and we would arrive too early. So even though we were leaving an hour later, we were still arriving at the same time. Phew!
TIP: We’d booked flights 9 months out to get business class reward seats. Even that early, we couldn’t get the direct flight so booked a connection through Melbourne. I kept checking availability on the direct, and it opened up a few weeks before. Lesson learned: book something that will work and keep checking for the flights you really want.
Because I only had carry-on luggage, I didn’t need to go through immigration and customs. I just followed the signs for international transfer, went through this separate security, and then popped-up basically at the entrance to the Qantas lounge. I’d made it!
When I arrived, the lounge was completely empty, and that’s when things started to go a little off track. I might have been the first person there and possibly the first person flying from Tokyo to Santiago via Sydney on two separate tickets. The staff were baffled by how I made it that far without a boarding pass (since I had checked in back in Tokyo). Then they told me, “Your flight to Santiago is delayed by 5 hours. No big deal – I needed a shower anyway.
Meanwhile, Andy decided to come to the airport super early to hang out with me. But the check-in desk wasn’t opening until 8am, so he ended up stuck there with all our luggage for our 7-week trip. By the time I finished my shower, they had sorted out my boarding pass and called me to the front desk. They asked where Andy was, so I explained he was still outside waiting for check-in to open.
To my surprise, they offered me a foot massage, sent someone to get Andy checked in, and gave us one of those little VIP rooms to relax in all day. This never happens! Andy took a nap while I knocked out a dozen emails and set my out-of-office reply.
The 12-hour flight to Santiago was pretty uneventful—basically a straight shot across the Pacific. This was also the third of four consecutive nights I spent sleeping on a plane.
