- Joined
- Nov 28, 2009
- Messages
- 14,886
- Reaction score
- 1,074
Some of you may have noticed I haven't posted much in the last month. that's because I've been away on a long holiday down under visiting my sister in law and her family. A few of you knew in advance I was going, but I wasn't going to post on a public forum in advance that my house was going to be empty for a month.
And some of you have asked for a report of how it went.
So this is part 1. Just the general stuff. (I'll do another post on Australian electrics later, but I first have to pull the pictures off the camera and re size them)
So we wanted to get from Inverness to Brisbane as cheap and easy as possible. I tried looking at flights from London, but all I could find was flights out of Heathrow. Unfortunately the only flights from Inverness take you to Gatwick, and I didn't want to throw the journey, with luggage, between the two into the travel itinerary.
I tried looking at flights from Newcastle as we have relatives there, but could not find anything where one leg didn't have a 10 hour stop over.
So just for a laugh, I entered Inverness to Brisbane into the travel agents search, and blow me down it gave an answer. A FlyBe flight from Inverness to Manchester connecting with an Etihad flight to Brisbane via Abu Dhabi, and the same on the return. Then it was just a case of try as many travel agents as possible to find the cheapest price, a tad over £2500 for 3 of us.
One concern was a short connection time at Manchester, but we were assured the luggage would be booked through all the way. As it happened at check in at Inverness we got the boarding passes for all 3 flights, and Manchester has a very quick and efficient flight transfer centre for changing from domestic to international flights. And our luggage was waiting on the carousel at Brisbane.
The two hop long haul flight turned into a 3 hop flight. There was a "technical stop" at Singapore thrown in as well which wasn't mentioned when booking (refuelling I guess), so roughly speaking three 8 hour flights. I can assure anyone who hasn't done it, sitting on your bum on a plane for more than 24 hours quickly loses it's appeal. We were all a bit like zombies at the end, and I fell asleep on the 3 hour car journey to SIL's house and woke up with a splitting headache which thankfully soon passed.
Now it's over 10 years since I have flown long haul, and how things have changed. Last time I flew was to the USA on a standard Jumbo, in the days when the in flight entertainment was one movie displayed on a couple of (CRT) screens hanging from the ceiling. you had no choice what it was or when it was shown.
But Etihad have a recent fleet of smaller Airbus A332's and now each passenger has an LCD screen in front of them with a library of films, music and games to play. and each seat has USB, ethernet and mains sockets for you to use your own electronic goodies (though you do have to pay if you want an internet connection)
SIL lives on a 600 acre farm in "the bush" roughly half way between Gympie, and Maryborough about 300 miles north of Brisbane. We chose to visit in their spring as we were assured it would be pleasant mid 20's temperature. Well Australia is having one of it's hottest years on record, and most days were high 20's and the hottest got up to 36. Far too hot for us northerners. but we didn't let that spoil the trip.
As well as familly time, and local stuff, we had two days on the Gold Coast, mainly for the kids benefit to visit Movie World and Sea World. One has to wonder why, in such a large country, with such a low population, so many of them want to live on top of each other in high rise blocks within 100 metres of the sea.
The other excursion took us to Fraser Island. The largest sand island in the world. A place most definitely worth visiting. There are very little in the way of surfaced roads on the island. It's 4 wheel drive only, and the main highway is 75 mile beach, with numerous sand roads linking other bits of the island. Because of the dry weather, the sand is unusually dry, making getting stuck a regular occurrence. Our trip was an organised tour in a 4WD bus, with an excellent driver who unstuck the bus each time it got bogged down without drama. It was only the sand roads that were a problem, the beach remained wet enough for the sand to be firm. We swam in two fantastic and warm fresh water lakes on the Island.
Their farmhouse was a 100 year old timber "Queenslander" style house. They bought it a a wreck expecting to build a new house, but did it up "for now" then decided they liked it so much they improved it further and extended it. A design of house that works in their warm, dry climate, but would not last 5 minutes here.
I'll talk about the electrics in another post, but a few general observations:
Everyone has their hot water tank outside the house, usually on the verandah. That wouldn't work here.
In the country it's normal not to have mains water. All their drinking water is rainwater collected from the roof of the house and all the outbuildings in big tanks. If things get desperate and a dry spell lasts too long, they have to buy in a tanker of water.
Thermostatic mixer showers don't seem to have reached Aus. All the 4 places we stayed just had a hot and cold tap for the shower, and you blend it yourself. Fine in an individual house, but useless in a hotel room as the temperature changes every time the next room turns on a tap.
It's normal practice to put washing machines and tumble dryers in the bathroom. Nobody understood my concerns about sockets right next to a shower and could not understand why we don't do that (sorry getting a bit onto the electric stuff)
Anyway 4 weeks seemed to go very quickly and all too soon it was time to come back. Again everything went smoothly, all 3 boarding cards on check in. Luggage arrived at Inverness, and the flight transfer centre at Manchester was quick. The last flight had quite a few empty seats, and a handy quirk of seat allocation, plus the fact a couple in the same row chose to move to a different vacant pair of seats, meant we had a block of 4 seats available, so we took turns to have a proper lie down sleep on this final overnight flight. It made a huge difference and left one wishing we could afford the extra for a first class seat.
but that Flight transfer centre needs a mention. We found a glaring great loophole in border security. Having got off the plane from Abu Dhabi, you branch off to the flight transfer centre before you get to passport control. There's one man behind a desk with a short queue to check your passport in the transfer centre, then you go and get onto your internal flight. At Inverness we were getting off an internal flight, so no customs. So the result is us, and all our luggage entered the UK without passing through customs, not even a "nothing to declare" channel.
Post on Australian electrics will some later.
And some of you have asked for a report of how it went.
So this is part 1. Just the general stuff. (I'll do another post on Australian electrics later, but I first have to pull the pictures off the camera and re size them)
So we wanted to get from Inverness to Brisbane as cheap and easy as possible. I tried looking at flights from London, but all I could find was flights out of Heathrow. Unfortunately the only flights from Inverness take you to Gatwick, and I didn't want to throw the journey, with luggage, between the two into the travel itinerary.
I tried looking at flights from Newcastle as we have relatives there, but could not find anything where one leg didn't have a 10 hour stop over.
So just for a laugh, I entered Inverness to Brisbane into the travel agents search, and blow me down it gave an answer. A FlyBe flight from Inverness to Manchester connecting with an Etihad flight to Brisbane via Abu Dhabi, and the same on the return. Then it was just a case of try as many travel agents as possible to find the cheapest price, a tad over £2500 for 3 of us.
One concern was a short connection time at Manchester, but we were assured the luggage would be booked through all the way. As it happened at check in at Inverness we got the boarding passes for all 3 flights, and Manchester has a very quick and efficient flight transfer centre for changing from domestic to international flights. And our luggage was waiting on the carousel at Brisbane.
The two hop long haul flight turned into a 3 hop flight. There was a "technical stop" at Singapore thrown in as well which wasn't mentioned when booking (refuelling I guess), so roughly speaking three 8 hour flights. I can assure anyone who hasn't done it, sitting on your bum on a plane for more than 24 hours quickly loses it's appeal. We were all a bit like zombies at the end, and I fell asleep on the 3 hour car journey to SIL's house and woke up with a splitting headache which thankfully soon passed.
Now it's over 10 years since I have flown long haul, and how things have changed. Last time I flew was to the USA on a standard Jumbo, in the days when the in flight entertainment was one movie displayed on a couple of (CRT) screens hanging from the ceiling. you had no choice what it was or when it was shown.
But Etihad have a recent fleet of smaller Airbus A332's and now each passenger has an LCD screen in front of them with a library of films, music and games to play. and each seat has USB, ethernet and mains sockets for you to use your own electronic goodies (though you do have to pay if you want an internet connection)
SIL lives on a 600 acre farm in "the bush" roughly half way between Gympie, and Maryborough about 300 miles north of Brisbane. We chose to visit in their spring as we were assured it would be pleasant mid 20's temperature. Well Australia is having one of it's hottest years on record, and most days were high 20's and the hottest got up to 36. Far too hot for us northerners. but we didn't let that spoil the trip.
As well as familly time, and local stuff, we had two days on the Gold Coast, mainly for the kids benefit to visit Movie World and Sea World. One has to wonder why, in such a large country, with such a low population, so many of them want to live on top of each other in high rise blocks within 100 metres of the sea.
The other excursion took us to Fraser Island. The largest sand island in the world. A place most definitely worth visiting. There are very little in the way of surfaced roads on the island. It's 4 wheel drive only, and the main highway is 75 mile beach, with numerous sand roads linking other bits of the island. Because of the dry weather, the sand is unusually dry, making getting stuck a regular occurrence. Our trip was an organised tour in a 4WD bus, with an excellent driver who unstuck the bus each time it got bogged down without drama. It was only the sand roads that were a problem, the beach remained wet enough for the sand to be firm. We swam in two fantastic and warm fresh water lakes on the Island.
Their farmhouse was a 100 year old timber "Queenslander" style house. They bought it a a wreck expecting to build a new house, but did it up "for now" then decided they liked it so much they improved it further and extended it. A design of house that works in their warm, dry climate, but would not last 5 minutes here.
I'll talk about the electrics in another post, but a few general observations:
Everyone has their hot water tank outside the house, usually on the verandah. That wouldn't work here.
In the country it's normal not to have mains water. All their drinking water is rainwater collected from the roof of the house and all the outbuildings in big tanks. If things get desperate and a dry spell lasts too long, they have to buy in a tanker of water.
Thermostatic mixer showers don't seem to have reached Aus. All the 4 places we stayed just had a hot and cold tap for the shower, and you blend it yourself. Fine in an individual house, but useless in a hotel room as the temperature changes every time the next room turns on a tap.
It's normal practice to put washing machines and tumble dryers in the bathroom. Nobody understood my concerns about sockets right next to a shower and could not understand why we don't do that (sorry getting a bit onto the electric stuff)
Anyway 4 weeks seemed to go very quickly and all too soon it was time to come back. Again everything went smoothly, all 3 boarding cards on check in. Luggage arrived at Inverness, and the flight transfer centre at Manchester was quick. The last flight had quite a few empty seats, and a handy quirk of seat allocation, plus the fact a couple in the same row chose to move to a different vacant pair of seats, meant we had a block of 4 seats available, so we took turns to have a proper lie down sleep on this final overnight flight. It made a huge difference and left one wishing we could afford the extra for a first class seat.
but that Flight transfer centre needs a mention. We found a glaring great loophole in border security. Having got off the plane from Abu Dhabi, you branch off to the flight transfer centre before you get to passport control. There's one man behind a desk with a short queue to check your passport in the transfer centre, then you go and get onto your internal flight. At Inverness we were getting off an internal flight, so no customs. So the result is us, and all our luggage entered the UK without passing through customs, not even a "nothing to declare" channel.
Post on Australian electrics will some later.
Last edited by a moderator:
