Ok, Ok, so it’s no so surprise to anyone but really it wasn’t our fault. Let me tell you what happened.

Pete had the alarm set for a quarter to five. No we didn’t sleep through it. Pete was out of bed before I’d even opened my eyes, walking down the hall waking everyone up. Everything was packed and in the car, we’d stayed up until midnight the night before doing all those things we’d promised ourselves we’d do weeks before; banking, last minute emails, what to put in the wash bag and so on. So all we had to do when we woke up was get dressed, breakfast was going to be grabbed on the way to the airport.

We left the house at 5.15. Call me sheltered, or tell me I don’t get out enough but I thought peak hour traffic started at seven thirty, didn’t even occur to me that traffic would be an issue, but apparently peak hour starts earlier than I thought. According to Pete there’s a whole peak hour that I had no idea of. The Tradie’s peak hour which starts at five thirty. It took us two and a half hours to crawl our way along the Pacific highway, a trip that would normally take at the most an hour and a half.

I thought leaving Brisbane was going to be the easy part of the trip, we were still on our home ground, we could understand what people were saying and we knew our way round. No pressure, a nice slow introduction for the kids into international travel. But no. seven thirty five and we were only just crossing the gateway bridge, the traffic had finally started to move.

Sitting in the drivers seat Pete took a deep breath and looked over at me.

‘Ok, we’re going to make it. Here’s the plan. I’ll drop you at the terminal with the bags, passports, tickets and kids. You get the bags labelled, get in the queue while I go and park the car and then run back.’

Four kids, bags, passports, bag tags (which yes we should have got before we left, in fact Paula could have got them when she raced to the shops late yesterday afternoon to buy us some locks, but who thinks of bag tags before they travel?).

‘Better plan,’ I said, ‘how about you get out with the kids, your stronger so you can carry more things and your better with passports than me. I’ll park the car and race back.’

‘But I can run faster, and what the hell does “good with passports” mean?’

‘Well you’re better at filling in forms.’

‘You don’t have to fill in a form, just have the passports ready.’

‘Luggage tags.’

‘Luggage tags are not a form.’

‘You reckon?’

‘OK, so you take the car.’

And then the kids got there first travel instructions for the trip from Pete.

‘Right. When we get there we’re going to have to race to make sure we don’t miss the plane. So everyone needs to put there jacket on, caps on head, back pack on shoulders.’

‘But it’s too hot, I don’t want to wear my jacket.’

‘No choice.’

‘But…’

‘To get on this plane you’re going to have to do what we say. Once we’re on you can take your jacket off, watch a movie, play on the play station, but for now you do what we say, right?’

‘OK,’ four subdued voices answered from the back of the car.

Parking the car was easy and a fast walk was enough to get me back to the queue before Pete had handed over the passports. Our four bags (yes we did manage to get luggage for six people for eight months into those four bags that were sitting in our library. And for those of you that were interested in the how to pack debate, whether to pack flat or pack with a vacuum seal or roll, I opted for the rolling.)

It was a bit of debacle at the check in counter with shampoo and face cleanser being 25mls over the limit of what you’re allowed to carry on board. We bagged them all up and shoved them into one of the suitcase to limit the chance of a shampoo bomb. The customs guys weren’t too impressed either. I’d carried on all my pills, potions and creams because our luggage wasn’t getting off with us in Tokyo, but with the help of few sealed plastic bags we made it through with ten minutes to spare before our flight was called for boarding.

We collapsed into the seats, checked if anyone needed to pee.

‘Close,’ I said to Pete.

‘Nah, this is nothing, they’re usually calling my name.’

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:26 am and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.