Wow what a mental week or so it's been. As you may have guessed from my blogging absence I've been busy ferrying my family the 12000(ish) miles to our new home at the end of the world (or New Zealand for all you normal people).
Our journey began on Wednesday 20th with an early start in the caravan in Harden, West Yorks to make sure we'd packed everything and get down into Bingley to meet up with the local garage, we were selling the car too. Then it was off to the playgym in Keighley to try and entertain/exhaust the boys, while I hightailed it over to the rental car company to pick up the car we would be driving down to Heathrow (200 miles ish!).
Then without any ceremony I filled the car with our luggage and we were off! Our household possessions had already been floating for a week and were somewhere in the Mediterranean so we would be living out of this luggage until they arrived in NZ (about 8 weeks hopefully). The next bit passed uneventfully with a boring drive down the M1, overnight stay at a Holiday Inn near Northampton and then a quick scoot round the M25 (designed by the devil if you believe Terry Pratchett) and straight into Heathrow!
Once we'd handed over our luggage to the lovely people at Qantas we went through security we were hit with our first snag - 3 hour delay on the flight. Qantas being Qantas they quickly handed out meal vouchers worth £12 per person (£48 for us then!) which we struggled to even spend one of (picky little kids and a nervous flyer who wasn't hungry).
Anyway once we'd whiled away the time watching planes take off and land we'd trundled onto the plane and took our seats, plugged the kids into the inflight entertainment and we were off. I have to say the Airbus A380 is a lovely plane, very quiet and Qantas have a great inflight entertainment system (iPads in the headrest of every seat). 6 hours later we land in Dubai, airport staff were great, it's 1.30am local time so 10.30pm in our heads and the kids haven't even slept yet but mummy and daddy are bushed. Quick turnaround and we're back in the same seats on the same plane and plugged in to the movies again, however this time we made the kids get some sleep.
12 hours later we land in Melbourne!
So now it's something like 1pm in our heads but 11pm in Melbourne and I've managed to grab about an hours sleep in the last 31 hours. We've got 10 hours till our next flight so we go through customs, grab our luggage and check in to the Holiday Inn to squeeze in a little sleep. This turned out to be a good choice as it's 400m from the airport, comfy and quiet and even better has a great shuttle and lovely staff. After feeling a bit refreshed after our 6 hour snooze we get back to the airport and join the queue for check in. The queue was boring but over quickly however watching the irate Aussie bloke try and brake the ATM in the doorway with a bollard and then get manhandled by the enormous Copper certainly livened things up.
Once through security, customs and bio security checks we finally get to the tiny little Airbus we'll be on to Wellington, my wife gets worried again (nervous flyer, remember) but once on board we're settled in and off. We have pretty much the pick of the seats as the flight isn't full and Qantas are up to their usual standards. 3 hours 15 minutes later we land in cloudy and wet Wellington, it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
Through the usual bio and customs checks at which point the lovely Kiwi immigration officer points out that two of our passports are incorrect, something to do with a checksum that their software calculates from the bar code thingy on the passport, and if we want to travel on it again we need to sort it out with the UK consulate - great!
Pick up the hire car, once again pile all our luggage in and drive over to our temp accommodation, purely by memory as the dumb ass driver ( that's me by the way) forgot to print out a map. Weirdly it's not far from where we stayed the last time we were here so it's easy to find, and Wellington isn't that big really.
So we collapse into the villa we've rented in Wadestown, Jeremy the owner already has the fire lit and has got in a few essentials (eggs, bread and milk etc) so we can just unpack and get the boys some tea and ready for bed like normal.
Total journey time door to door 64 hours
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