Our return journey to the antipodes made for a 48 hour day.
On Sunday morning Italian time we watched the Rugby World Cup final and spent the rest of the day seeing the sights and visiting museums in Rome. Then at 4.30pm we took our bags on the Metro to the main railway station where we caught the express train to the airport.
Checking in and negotiating passport control took two hours. Then we had sushi and fruit salad while we waited for our 9.30pm boarding call.
The first leg of our flight home was a four and a half hour trip to Dubai where we waited three hours for the next flight. Dubai’s airport isn’t a wonderful place to spend time: in my limited experience I’d rank it just above Brunei. Still, eventually we boarded the big Airbus 380 for the thirteen hours to Sydney.
We succeeded in getting some sleep on this longest leg of our trip. I watched a couple of movies, one of which was quite good: a Franco-Belgian comedy about the abolition of border controls with the establishment of common tarrifs.
Eventually Richard and I, the walking dead, arrived in Sydney where we had another wait before the two and a half hour leg to Auckland.
After negotiating customs we checked our luggage through to Wanganui and tried to stay awake while we waited the five hours for our flight back to Wanganui. We’re very grateful to Stacey and Maddison for ferrying us home from the airport.
I don’t find long distance travel too bad; the intermediate stop-overs are the most wearing part of the process for me. Today the five hours waiting for our Wanganui flight were the worst, but having arrived here safely we think we’ve done well.
