And off we go!

Tullamarine, Australia

(Written somewhere over the Banda Sea, Indonesia. I’ll update with photos later.)

Fortunately we had a 7am flight rather than 6 am, so we could sleep in until 5am. Yep. Of course my body clock decided 4.40 was a better time to wake up. Yep.

I did some last minute reshuffling of stuff between bags and had coffee, glorious coffee.

Then it was time to go, courtesy of Nanna’s taxi. The roads and the airport were practically deserted at 6am, so check-in was quick, with the advantage of having our bags checked through to London, so no struggling with bags between flights in Melbourne.

Our flight left early, but then couldn’t get a park in Melbourne, so it ended up not being as early an arrival as they’d hoped. Not to worry, we had 4 hours between flights.

Plenty of time to buy postcards (really), have a light breakfast and more coffee, check in (the woman in front of us was amazed by our light packing, until we told her we actually had other bags but they were already checked in), clear security, fill in a green card at customs and try to look like our passport photos (not easy when you woke up before 5am) – and then we had about 20 minutes until our plane would be (nominally) ready for boarding.

According to the signs in the terminal, most of that time would be spent in getting to the very furthest departure gate. I think they design these signs for the very slowest people.

We could see the plane out the window so we took a few photos and watched the catering being loaded. We are being accompanied on our trip by ‘Bear’, a little bear made for our late father by his mother. We thought it would be nice to take him back to Dad’s hometown and show him around. Who knows, he might remember some of it!

The first leg of our flight, Royal Brunei flight 54 left Melbourne at 12.15. We were expecting a 7 hour flight, due to arrive in Bandar Seri Begawan at 5.20 pm local time (7.20 pm our time).

Once the flight was underway they told us it would be a lot quicker due to heavy tail winds, so our revised ETA was 4.15 pm. Less flying time, more time in Brunei Airport. I’ll decide if this is a good thing once we get there.