2006/08 Australia trip - The trip home |
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Tuesday August 22nd
We were up by 6 am and off to the airport soon after. We planned to catch up on sleep on the plane. This was just after the liquid explosives plot in Britain so we had no idea what kind of security screening we’d encounter. John kindly took us and our pile of luggage through the Melbourne rush hour traffic to the airport. We managed to get our cases routed all the way through to Minneapolis, but that didn’t help us much, as I’ll explain later. Then, when going through the security gate our carry-ons were weighed. Anyone with an overweight bag had to go back outside and slim it down. As people had already checked their other bags it wasn’t clear how they could do this other than by tossing stuff away! Luckily we’d already slimmed ours and put stuff into our new bag.
We stopped in Auckland as this was another Air New Zealand flight and had to go through their security too. Then when we got to Los Angeles we simply had to take our cases through customs and hand them over to Security to be put on the Northwest flight. And this is where we were stuck for a long time. Many of our flight’s passengers were going on to Britain and all their cases were being searched. We were at the back of a queue that snaked all around the terminal until a supervisor went through the queue pulling out passengers to other destinations. Luckily we had a long layover anyway so we weren’t in much danger of missing our next flight.
We arrived in Minneapolis just before midnight, and Michael and Christina collected us. I slept about ten hours straight, though Sandie still seemed to be jet-lagged, but that’ll all be in a future story.
Love to you all from Pete and Sandie