adventure – ALIVE AND CREAKING

Not jet-lagged, just dog tired!

27 hours of travelling and I arrived back at Heathrow airport at 5 am on Monday morning. The journey had involved 3 flights, two with Qantas and one with BA. The Australian airline wins hands down on customer service… I was fortunate enough to fly Business class and Qantas made me feel welcome, used my name when talking to me (whereas BA just called me ‘Madam’…).

I left a sunlit Adelaide and changed planes at Sydney Airport. Note to schedule planners – it is a LONG way to the transfer gate of the internal terminal, the connecting bus to the international terminal doesn’t run that often, and my onward flight to Hong Kong departed from the furthest gate! I arrived on board puffing and panting and with just enough time to find my seat and down a glass of champagne before we took off….

Hong Kong Airport is massive and rather impersonal. It is also somewhat disconcerting to see people walking round in surgical masks. I felt as if I was ‘unclean’ and they feared I carried some rogue virus!

The next 13 hours were exhausting, even though I slept through 6 of them. Outside was total darkness, and the cabin crew were hard to find. All in all not a great experience.

And so back to London and my pre-booked taxi – which failed to turn up! Two hours and several phone calls later I ceased to be a customer of the Leicester based taxi company (who advertise on line as a specialist airport transfer service ‘you can trust’!!) and hired a car to drive myself back to Leicestershire.

The end of my wonderful Australian adventure – but just the beginning of 2013 and all the adventures I have still to experience. Watch this space…. Meanwhile I can look at pictures like this to remind me that there is an exciting world out there where the path can lead who knows where…

The start of an adventure

Next week I am going to Australia for a month to stay with some very special people.

This won’t be my first visit to Oz as I lived there for a year in 1977/78. Then I lived in Queensland, first in Surfers Paradise and later on Lindeman Island on the Barrier Reef. It was a wonderful year and I fell in love with the country. Now as I plan my return – this time to Adelaide in South Australia – I wonder how different it will be after 35 years!

I plan to try and blog my journey which starts at Heathrow, then a couple of days in Singapore before heading off to Adelaide via Melbourne. Hopefully I will meet some interesting people en route, have some exciting new adventures and, most attractive at the moment, some SUNSHINE!

2844-10 — Where I started my year in Australia

Here goes!

So, it’s June 26 2012 and in a couple of months I’ll be 65. What does that mean? Do I suddenly stop being part of the human race? Am I to be put out to grass? Should I take up knitting? Look for a warden controlled bungalow? Start wearing tweed skirts? Invest in a mobility scooter?

Well, I’ve got news for you all – I don’t intend to do any of the above. I remember my Dad singing a song about life beginning at 40, but these days 60 seems to be the new 40 and in my case it’s going to be 65.

On 1 January I was in St Lucia and I started the new year by zip-lining in the rain forest and decided then and there that my new motto will be ‘I will’ – not ‘I can’ or ‘I might’ but ‘I will’

I have worked full time all my life and in just over 6 weeks time I will be leaving a job I have held for the last 15 years. In some ways this will be sad, but whenever there is an ending there has to be a beginning, and I choose to make this my new beginning.

This blog will record how I cope with this major change in my life and if anyone cares to read it, they can share the challenges with me – and maybe even give me some advice if I have the occasional wobble.

Please be advised however that this will NOT be a heavy soul-searching blog but – I hope – a humourous look at how a 65 year old woman tries new things.