In Brisbane
We made it to Brisbane! I must say that was a rough trip from Thailand to Brissy, it seemed to take 48 hours. It started off badly for me anyway, on the Sunday night for whatever reason my stupid body had, I got ~3 hours sleep. No matter how hard I tried after about 1:30am I could not get back to sleep. So by 6:30am when I got up I was already knackered from the start! We finished packing up and said goodbye to the Brits, then too Jin and Poi, and got our own taxi to the Airport.
Once we checked in (very easy, we were so early because we'd shared a Taxi with Peter, Mary and Maggie) we went and sat in a cafe for an hour, mostly because it had aircon. Certainly not because of the Wifi it offered, which was slower than dialup. Once it was getting close to boarding time we walked up to the departure gate. Koh Samui airport is "strange" in that it's like a regular airport where they make you walk past all the shops before you get to your gate, but this time all the shops are their own closed up air-conditioned thing, but the walk past them is outside.
The gate itself was the best. It had:
- Fast Free Wifi
- Free (???) drinks and food
- No airconditioning, just fans
- BUT THE TOILETS were airconditioned and in the mens, standing at the Urinal there was a massive fishtank you could watch while you peed.
Quite bizarre. Our plane was 30 minutes late to board too, but eventually the shuttle/tram/people transport thing turned up to take us out to the plane.
Once we landed in Singapore we caught the Skytrain over to the Terminal with our Transit Hotel and checked in, then went to see the Butterfly Garden, went for a swim and I took the kids to a playground (with a pretend Helicopter that Theo could spin the propellers of), before it was time to get on our plane to Brisbane. In total we were in Singapore Airport for about 6 hours. I'd liked to have gone to visit "The Jewel" but you had to clear immigration for that and bugger that.
The flight to Brisbane wasn't great. Well, Theo had a good sleep with his Banana-Banana. Beth was more difficult to get to sleep, but she did eventually have an hour or so. Sarah got a little bit of sleep too, and I sort of did even though the old dear in the seat behind me I wanted to hit. Especially I'd just got off to sleep and she started to loudly talk at me about something. Not sure exactly what it was, something about "You must have slept on planes before sonny" or something, I can't recall. She was super annoying though. Just loud and dumb. The flight was 6 hours (not 17h like the inflight system initially said, causing me to shit myself)
Anyway eventually after a hard flight with not much sleep we arrived in Brisbane at 6:45am. The queue for immigration was insane, even the "Parents with children under 10" queue took us an hour, I don't want to think about how long the other queues took! Finally we made it through and then Jeremy and Nicole came to pick us up (thanks you two!)
We drove to our Air BnB and got unpacked, then all went for a sleep. I got up at midday and got the kids up too, much to their annoyance. Then I took Jeremy's car out to get some lunch, and then we cruised for a few hours before going to the local Coles to get some supplies.
Then at 6pm we went to Jeremy and Nicole's for dinner, saying a quick hello to Fletcher again. Pa joined us, we had a lovely meal and Beth and Theo got the Acubra's that Granny got for them. Both very pleased with them to say the least. Then we came back home because we were all sideways, then went to bed. Everyone slept for at least 12 hours, Theo and Sarah are still upstairs going on 15 hours later now, asleep. I woke Theo up at 8:30 for a wee, thinking he'd probably get up after that but no he was back to sleep and shows no signs of getting up yet!
Not 100% sure what we'll do today, but something when everyone's all awake.
Tim