Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Journey Back Home

On Sunday, August 14th, Nic and I got up very early to finish saying goodbye. We said bye to Stu and had one more tearful goodbye with Susan before Rob dropped us off at the airport.

Once we got to Melbourne, we met up with our friends Hayley and Sam at the airport McDonalds. They drove in from Bendigo to see us! It was so great to catch up with them and we felt very special that they would make such a long trip so early in the morning to spend only one short hour with us.
After catching up and saying goodbye, we went through security, then got in line for immigration. While in line, Nic noticed a board flashing what he thought said "Final Call" next to our flight. We thought we still had quite a bit of time to get to our gate, but immediately got in the VIP line. Even when we spoke to the guy at the counter he said we were cutting it close, but as long as we walked fast, we should be fine. We hurried off, nervously, towards our gate, which of course, was the furthest gate. We heard over the loud speaker a last call announcement for the following passengers....when we heard our names we felt so guilty. Hayley and I had just talked about people needing to be paged for their flight and how we couldn't believe people weren't more responsible and considerate. Then there we were, we had turned into those people. :/. We ran all the way to our gate where all the crew was waiting for us. One lady said, "The ENTIRE plane is waiting for you." We felt horrible. Luckily, the one other guy who they paged arrived after us so we didn't have to feel like we were entirely at fault for holding up our flight. Then as we were taxing, we got stuck in a stand-off with another plane and had to be moved back by a truck to clear the path. When we finally took off, it was at our normal departure time and the flight information screen listed a much earlier arrival time than I had on my flight information. The only thing Nic and I can come up with is that our flight time had changed. Even Tyler said that our flight was listed on the board with a much earlier arrival time than we told him, so I guess now we  know to always double check flight information the night before traveling. Needless to say our experience at the Melbourne airport both coming and going were stressful. We definitely cut it close.

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