Holding the Reins of the Runaway Extrovert 2013: Day 28 - Longer than expected last day at home

Holding the Reins of the Runaway Extrovert 2013: Day 25 - What a night!

My lord what a night!

After finishing work early, and packing like a madman, Steve and I raced to the airport by taxi - with a mad-as-a-hatter taxi driver who hated the police, insurance companies and lord, everyone! How do we attract them? - and arrived at 7.15pm for our 8.10pm flight.

So far so good.

But after finally getting through security, we reached the food court where the intention was to grab a quick dinner and when we couldn't find our flight at 8.10, I started to wonder if I had booked the right flight! Then I glanced over, and saw our flight at 10.15pm instead! WTF? Turns out, when we went to the gate and spoke to a Virgin customer service woman that Cyclone Oswald in Qld had caused big delays in Brisbane from where our plane was coming.

After getting $16 in food coupons each - they were generous at least in that regard although I suspect they thought, as Steve suggested, we were two separate parties - we settled in at the bar there for 3 hours with a bottle of white wine, and food mostly bought by Virgin (the $32 in vouchers covered most of the $42 food cost; I paid for the wine - and actually had a rather lovely date night.

With everything shutting down, we headed down to the gate at 9.45pm to find the flight had been pushed back to 10.50pm which gave me great concern since 11pm is the curfew. I suspected the flight would eventually be cancelled and alas at 10.45pm it was.

Virgin promised to get us on new flights but that took a while and add into that the fact that 1/3 of the passengers could stay in their seats as instructed and kept bothering the staff over and over. Idiots! Anyway finally got our seats on the 6am flight at 11.15pm - Steve lined up while I chatted to a delightful female Canadian tourist in her 50s who was relaxed about the delay - and we raced out to grab a taxi to find 600,000 people and 2 taxis. Ugh! So downstairs to the trains, which took us to Central at 11.30pm where we waited till 12.05 for a train.

Finally home at 12.30 and in bed by 1am - Aidan was up, just in from drinks so heard our tale of woe - and had a gran total of 3 hours sleep before getting up for the flight.

What a night!