It is good to be early

Melbourne airport opens at 5:00am.  Unfortunately we are here before then. Way before ...

Tom and I have history when it comes to flying and missing flights. It started years ago on our first trip to Europe. We were staying at the dodgiest flea pit in London and getting ready for our last night in the UK.  Then a knocking on the door by someone insisting her room mate let her in made us do a double take; surely we still had the room for one more night? Surely? A quick check of our tickets and OOPS, no, we should have departed that day! How exactly do you get it wrong by a whole day? In our defence we had been travelling for three months and the days were starting to blend into each other. So we slinked out of the hotel, and as we settled up our bill heard a young lady in the foyer loudly complaining to be friends that the hotel had stuffed up and double booked her room etc ... I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and explain, no they hadn't, but why draw attention to ourselves ! So we abandonded our dinner plans and headed out to Heathrow to see how we could fix this mess. Strangely at Heathrow we were in a queue of people who had all missed flights. As we waited we heard people come up with increasingly fanciful reasons as to why they had not made their flight, and we decided not to shame ourselves in the same way and just tell the truth. They put us on the next flight the next day - no extra cost. Those were the good old days!

So now I am obsessive about being on time.  Which is why we arrived at Tullamarine at 4:30am. What I had not realised when setting the alarm for 3:00am is that for the first leg we fly domestic to Brisbane, so we only had to be here 30 minutes before the flight, not two hours! Tom should be cross but he is strangely sanguine, maybe because he knows that despite the early morning these things are best left to me to plan.  Those of you who know the story will recall our visit to Brisbane organised by Tom a couple of years ago - the time when we arrived at the airport about 2 hours late. Yep, Tom misread the itinerary and confused  the departure time with the arrival time. Tragic though that story is, what is more tragic is that we did exactly the same thing coming back. And both ways the airline slugged us with huge extra fees.

And that explains why we are here before even the cafe is open. Despite the quite large number of people here the cafe, nor anything else for that matter, does not open until 5:00am.  So there is quite a queue for coffee when it finally does open.  There is less of a queue at the bar, which also opens at 5:00am.  I know what you are thinking, who gets a beer before breakfast, and indeed the bar only has two customers: and just to keep all those sterotypes alive those customers are, of course, German tourists.

As we wait to board I watch the Departure screens to pass the time and observe that before 8:10am there are three flights to Hobart and two to Launceston.  How good must Tasmania be ?  Maybe our next travel destination.