Sydney to Shanghai
We were at home Thursday morning getting ready for our 11am
departure, this should have left us with sufficient time to finalise our
packaging and get Alexis to take us to the airport in a very casual and
relatively un-stressful manner.
Justin flight to Shanghai was at 9.30am, so he had a little
wait at Shanghai airport for us. He was to make his own way to Sydney airport.
At around 6.00am I get this frantic phone call at home,
Justin's at the airport without his passport and they have to dash home to get
it and it looks like he’ll miss his 9.30am flight! So we hit the panic button.
Justin needed his booking number, he didn’t have his
e-ticket with him so he could talk to Qantas about rescheduling his flight.
Could I get it from his Outlook? Sounds relatively simple enough, but as he
hadn’t logged out of Outlook correctly my backup at home wouldn’t let me into
his, more things to do. Finally I get the booking reference and ring them back,
poor Mel was in a flap as Justin's driving home like he's driving an F1 race.
Then comes the news after they talked to Qantas it'll cost
him A$500 no-show fee with Qantas otherwise they’ll cancel his return flight!
I'm madly looking up if Justin can get onto our China
Eastern flight, yes he can, but he has to buy a full ticket. So we’re looking at
a full priced ticket plus $500! Wow, we didn’t need to buy the plane, just a
seat for one flight would do.
Justin can only see the $ signs, and is worried as he can't
afford this. So I tell him to try his hardest to get one the flight, he's now
got his passport and on a train to the airport as the morning peak hour is in
full swing now. I said don’t worry about the cost Wunda will cover it, hoping
that our travel insurance covers leaving a passport at home, I don’t think it
does! He says it’s his mistake, he’ll pay. What a nice boy.
Around 8am I get a message that he's checked in and going
through customs! Whew! That was 2 hours out of my packing time, so now I have to
rush big time, Alexis is still in bed, and our driver needs her rest!
We made it to the flight with no time to go and enjoy the
lounge and they wheel me right through customs and to the plane, now if my leg
wasn’t sore it’d be a great way to skip the queues etc., but I would gladly
rather have been able to walk through.
For those that don’t know what happened to my leg and would
like to know, click here. If you’ve heard the story (multiple times according to
Jayne) you can skip this!
.
Day 2 saw us on a Bullet Train to Danyang, where a supplier
is. The bullet train system here is amazing, why don’t we have this between
Brisbane – Sydney – Melbourne at least?
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The train got to 297km/hour according to the speedo we
could see, but didn’t get over 300km/hr.
