A Trip To Europe
Grandad was sitting in his office just off to the side of the house, he’s retired now, but he may of been checking emails or doing something admin based. I’m on the phone to mum, nothing out of the usual, we usually speak once or twice a day just to a have a yarn and touch base. She suggest we travel to Indonesia for Christmas, a family trip. I jokingly suggest London, as Grandad hasn’t been to Europe and neither have I. However mum has been twice, once alone and once with my two younger sisters.
It was that little idea that got the ball rolling a lot faster than usual. It went from Christmas to August which is the month of Grandad’s birthday. With passport delays mum and the immediate family pulled out, some couldn’t make it with the short notice. Fair enough. It’s only because work was quiet for me and Grandad is retired that we could essentially disappear to the other side of the globe for three and a half weeks.
Grandad said to me, “Well I don’t care where we go, so you just choose and we’ll go”.
Not the hardest decision to make, there were plenty of places I’ve always wanted to visit in Europe, so I picked the first ones that came to mind, with very little research.
Fly to London, Sweden, Berlin, then Paris and finally into regional France where Grandad’s sister lives.
He hadn’t seen her in close to 20 years, so it made sense we go visit her in Albi, a small town around 700km south of Paris, where little English is spoken, more the challenge being we don’t speak French.
We started booking things in, flights, hotels, Air bnb’s, etc. It became a thing, we were going to Europe!
One thing I really wanted to avoid is a ridiculously tight, and neat schedule. Where everyday we HAD to be somewhere.
So instead the plan of attack was more simpler. Let’s get a coffee in the morning, some breakfast and figure what we wanted to do. We still made sure to do the main things, like in London we would see Big Ben, Paris the Eiffel Tower etc.
I flew to Perth from Broome, Grandad coming a few days later from Kununurra. We were set to depart from Perth International airport at 10:30pm, Tuesday night. 11 hours to Dubai and a further 7 to London, in which we would arrive at lunch time, doing our body clocks a pretty good favour. Leave at bedtime and arrive at lunch the next day, how good!
This operation was never going to run smoothly though, Grandads flight the night before we went to London was cancelled last minute and pushed back to the next day. A pain in the back and it also caused a bit of a worry, but he did fly in the next day in the afternoon, even leaving us with a couple hours to kill before heading to the airport for out long flight.
Storms were happening in Perth, or bad weather to say the least. And to our luck, the power went out at the International airport because of that.
We waited, waited, did more waiting, and before you know it there was line of around 300+ people trying to check in. All on our flight, all on the way to Dubai.
The power came back on, some people clapped and we swore in relief.
We checked in after some hours in the line, got through security and onto the plane. Two blokes from the bush, grandfather and grandson, off to London.
