..... and we are off

I packed my backpack last night. It's the same one that I used when we trekked around Europe back in 1982. It needed a few repairs. Some of the clips on the straps had broken and had to be replaced. It was easy to find clips, but not ones to match the ones on the pack. I had to break the ones that were on the bag and sew the new clips on with new straps. In the process I broke several needles, but now the pack was usable again. I bought new travel packs for Paula and Daniel. I found that searching on the internet I could find packs at much cheaper prices than I could find at any of the local shops. I got the bags delivered - a 55lt one for Paula, and an 80lt for Daniel.

I finally got to bed at about 1:30 for a 6:00 am alarm call so that we could catch the Gull Bus to the airport. I had booked the bus for 7:30 am. When I got up Paula was already up, and I found out that she had been up all night doing final packing and preparations. We have had to get our dog and cat looked after while we are away.

There was quite a crowd waiting for the bus. We left the car keys in the boot of the car for my brother to come and get sometime over the weekend, and boarded the bus. There were only a couple of spare seats. Not bad value though. $30 for each of us, and dropped off right at the International terminal at Tullamarine. When we got there, Andrew and his parents were already there waiting for us to arrive. We went straight to checkin, because when I had gone to book the seats on the internet we had only been able to get individual seats spread throughout the plan. We managed to get two lots of two seats, so Paula and I had seats over the wing, and Daniel and Andrew had the very back seats with a space in between them, so they had room to spread out.

Food and service were good with Singapore Airlines and we had about 3 hours in Transit at Changi Airport. We spent that time wandering around the airport which is huge. It is made up of 3 interconnected terminals, and could take you about an hour to get from one extremity to another. There are lounges spread throughout the place with free internet, internet gaming, TV lounges shops and activities for kids. We went for a walk to get some fresh air and found the Sunflower Garden. Unfortunately this has been hijacked as a "smoking area", and we went back inside to check out the multitude of shops.

We were due to leave Singapore at 7 pm, but there was a delay because 6 people had missed the checkin time and for security reasons, the ground staff had to locate their bags on the plane and remove them. We finally left about half an hour late, but must have made up some time along the way because we arrived in Kolkata at around the right time after about 3.5 hours in the air.