Reinstated! - London Lockdown - Day 180

Woke to an early morning call today. It made our day!

The lovely woman from Japanese Airlines was phoning to see if we would like a seat on their flight to Sydney on 15th October - it didn’t take us long to make up our minds. 

So, we have a new flight. 

Given the experience of thousands of Australians in the same situation, we needed to take a little bit of a check - there will always the possibility that we could be bumped from the flight in period leading up to the 15th. 

The news was not greeted as enthusiastically by Maddie, but she understands that we need to get home at some stage. 

But life goes on. Most days we make our way to Maddie and Kevan’s to help out where we can. Still many small jobs as part of their setting up the house, plus time with Emilia - giving Maddie and Kevan to catch up on sleep or work. It is a very treasured time. 

How cute!

 

Bumped Again! - London Lockdown - Day 173

How time has flown! 

Our daily routine would seem most uninteresting to most - so I won’t bore you with all the details, but for us it has been a most rewarding period. This may seem at odds with the news we received via email this morning - our flight to Australia on 30th September has been cancelled - again!

We have now been added to the tens of thousand of Australians that have been shafted by the Australian Government and the airlines. The PR spin by the government - you should have come back in March when we told you to return - hides the true character of all the governments of Australia.  How naïve and lack of understanding of personal circumstances of its citizens who happen to be overseas with many other commitments. It is a sad reflection on what is meant by being Australian. 

Enough of that! We are in a fortunate position that our extra time in the UK meant that we could see our grand-daughter grow through the first few months of Emilia’s life. 

We still have the problem now of where do we go from here? The scramble for seats on planes has sent prices through the roof, as well as the unscrupulous practices by airlines selling seats they know they cannot fill (because of the quotas on the number of passengers allowed into Oz each week), makes us less confident about what is the best approach. We have even reconciled the fact that we could be here in London to well after Christmas. Maddie is very happy about that prospect!

But we still need to get home at some stage - and there is always the problem of our lack of a visa at this stage!