Sunday morning we got up and had Hotel Breakfast - thought we might as well give it a go while we were there. It wasn't half bad either, decent bacon and eggs and sausages etc, coffee juice all that stuff. Then we walked down and got on the tram, amazingly for race day it wasn't actually that bad either, we basically just walked onto a tram. One of the helpers said "You're lucky, 30 minutes ago it was chaos" so I guess we just arrived at the right time! We arrived at the track and I bought some Race Radio headphones - we already had the big orange ones I use for gardening but it's so noisy so it was nice to get another set so we could both have earmuffs with radio. They were only $100 which sure, not super cheap but actually cheaper than what Sarah paid for the Orange ones from Mitre 10 a while ago. Then we went and took our seats and got ready! First up was a Formula 2 race which was pretty exciting, then the drivers Parade finally happened where all the drivers get in an oldschool car and do a lap of the circuit. Finally 3pm rolled around and it was RACE TIME.
Boy oh Boy was it an exciting race. So many crashes and restarts and all sorts. We saw someone's car comnig down Pit Straight with flames shooting out the back. I think all up there were 4 restarts which I think is/was a new record for an F1 race. Right when they were decicing if they were going to have the last lap or not everyone in the crowd was chanting "ONE MORE LAP! ONE MORE LAP!" but then when they DID the last lap it was under safety car conditions and no one was allowed to overtake until they crossed the finish line, but that WAS the finish. Anyway it really made little sense to me, I mean I understood what/why but it seemed dumb to do a lap when they already knew the result? F1 though, I still don't really get it at all. But everyone said it was the most exciting race of the season so far, with so many crashes and little overtakes and all that sort of stuff. So it was great we got our money's worth I suppose?
Once we'd seen the Podium and watched everyone get onto the track (we didn't try) we caught the tram home. We didn't even have to line up that long to do that, I mean it took us 30 minutes to get on a tram and then 30 minutes for the ride to get off, but that wasn't too bad really considering there'd been something like 130,000 people at the event. Though when we left it seemed like half of them were still on the track!
Got back and went for dinner at a Mexican resturant which was pretty nice. Though damnit I left one of my favourite jumpers on the chair, which was dumb of me. Still that was the only casuality of the whole trip so not too bad I guess? Next day we got up and packed our bags, ate a big bowl of Fruit Loops and then went down to call our cab. I followed the link we'd been given by Boys Trip and our Uber was booked, until it cancelled 2 minutes later. Fuckers. So we had to book our own Uber instead to the airport. The one thing that did happen as we were waiting for our Uber was we got an alert from Air New Zealand "YourMelbourne Flight is 45 minutes delayed". Well fuck, that almost certainly meant we were going to miss our connecting flight into Napier that night.
Anyway we got to the Airport and dropped our bags at bagdrop, went and got some coffee and breakfast. Sarah tried ringing Air NZ to see if they could do something to rebook us on a later flight to Napier but there wasn't one and their callcentre was pretty much totally useless. So we hopped on our flight and midway through a hostess came over and told us we'd been rebooked by the system, we'd now be staying a night in Auckland, then on Tuesday morning getting flown to Wellington to catch a 3:30pm flight to Napier. Ok quite a pain in the arse but no worries. So we landed in Auckland, went and found someone to give us our hotel and meal voucher (the crabbiest old bag that Air NZ could find apparently) and got the bus to our Hotel. They put us up in the Naumi which was actually quite a nice hotel, though you had to walk miles to get to your room. No worries we had lots of experience from walking miles each day in Melbourne. So we stayed there the night and then went back to the Airport that morning and waited there for a couple of hours to board our 12pm flight. Finally just as we were boarding - fuck me. We got a "Sorry your Napier flight is cancelled" message JUST as we were boarding. We frantically spoke to the attendant "Should we board" and she made some calls and said yes, just get on. I mean our bags were already on the plane anyway...
So after a very annoying sitting-in-the-sky-wondering-when-the-fuck-we-were-really-going-to-get-home flight we landed in Wellington. And we found out that we were NOW booked to flight to Christchurch that afternoon, stay ANOTHER NIGHT this time in Christchurch and then catch a very early morning Christchurch to Napier flight home on the Wednesday morning. So fuck that, we went and spoke to AirNZ who said "Oh yes you can just hire a car" so while I went to see if I could stop our bags going on the Christchurch flight Sarah went and talked to about 7 car rental places. None had a car. By this stage the Christchuch flight had been delayed by 30 minutes, thank god, because I found our bags on the baggage carousel going round and round. I grabbed them and Sarah managed to find a car rental place (the last one!) that would let us hire a car and drive it one way to Napier. The car was a massive Ford Explorer Ute, Turbo Diesel. We went and double confirmed that AirNZ would let us hire a $1200 car to which the lady said yes that will be fine (I got Sarah to record this conversation in case AirNZ come back and deny us) so that's what we did. We hired a massive Ford Ute and drove home. Traffic out of Wellington was a fucking nightmare because OF COURSE there'd been a petrol truck catch on fire somewhere so Transmission Gully bypass was closed. So we sat in the worst traffic I've ever sat in in Wellington before for ~1 hour or so. But once we got out of that, thank fuck, we were on the way. We finally arrived at home at about 8:40pm, Mary had kindly bought the kids around to home and as we got out of the car I saw Theo curtain twitching and getting SUPER excited when they knew we were home. Out of the door the kids came flying, not knownig who to hug first. So that was nice.
So yea, we made it, ~24 hours later than we were supposed to and with a $1400 bill on our Credit Card ($200 is refunded for returning the car, the other $1200 AirNZ have to pickup, plus Diesel) but better than the ~36 or so hours AirNZ would have had us. Neither of us wanted to go to the South Island because what if AirNZ cancelled another plane? Then we'd be STUCK on the wrong Island. There's no way to drive because all the Ferrys are broken and cancelled. So I'm really glad we drove, even though it took us 4 hours. The car, massive though it was, had a nice cruise control feature where it keeps a good safe distance from the car in front (even breaking when it needed to) so it was quite an easy drive.
I went around and got Biscuit from Grant's place. He'd been a mostly good dog, doing a few escape tricks a few times so he turned into an inside dog which I'm sure he loved. He was happy to see us I think, though a bit confused also.
And yea, that's our Melbourne Trip over and done with. I'm really glad the whole F1 trip bit went perfectly, it's a real shame that because of that one 45 minute delay that we then got thrown into travel Chaos, but we manage to claw out of it. Now I just have to claw back the $ from AirNZ which I think will be super fun, but hey. I've got time and patience to do that.
So then I had two "normal" days at work and now it's Good Friday. It's raining and I've got a cold, which is very annoying. Mostly just a sore throat though, otherwise I feel pretty good. That's one thing I was SO paranoid about while we were away, or even before we went away, getting sick. The night before we left as we were dropping the kids off at Holly's I felt really bad and unwell, but I just ignored it. I told myself I can't get sick for the big trip and it mostly seemed to have worked, I still felt a bit average when we got to Melbourne for the first night but after that I turned out OK. Now we're back I'm sick again, worse thing time though. Anyway who cars, we did it! We had a great time, Sarah really enjoyed it. The trip was amazing really, even though I'm not much of a F1 fan I have to say it was great to go and experience it, to see the massive crowds, and to see how fact the cars are in real life. It was all quite amazing.
And that's about that, Mr Diary Sir.
Tim
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