taco's & toucan's travels ~ 2019

aussiefitzy.com

DAY 74

Week 11

SYDNEY (New South Wales, AUS) to TOWNSVILLE (Queensland, AUS)
via BRISBANE (Queensland, AUS)

Monday May 27^th, 2019

TODAYS MILEAGE – 1,161 miles / 1,868 kilometres

TRIP MILEAGE – 33,862 miles / 54,496 kilometres

Without putting a glass eye to sleep with the detail, there’s not a lot one could comment on regarding a 16½ non-stop transpacific flight other than nothing happened – thankfully.

We arrived 30 minutes late into Sydney and had to complete a lap or two of Botany Bay due to landing congestion associated with the Sydney Airport Curfew Act that see’s the skies of Australia’s most populus city averaging 1,667 arrivals and 1,322 departure movements each month between the hours of 6AM to 8AM.

A little trick I learnt with the introduction of the Australian Border Force ePassport SmartGates facilities is that it’s actually faster to bypass that system and go through manual processing as the walk from Gate 9 to Passport Control has 11 kiosks dispensing the Arrivals receipt for use by the citizens of the following countries - Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Macau, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the United States of America.

All up it took the best part of 2 hours to get over to the domestic terminal for my 10AM connecting 1½ hour flight to Brisbane. With a 2 hour layover, I grabbed some sushi at the airport, ran into an old work colleague from my days out at the Cannington Mine and continued on to land in Townsville at around 4:30 PM, about ½ an hour later than the scheduled arrival.

While walking through the arrivals, I ran into the newly minted member for Herbet, former work colleague and great bloke - Phil Thompson. After congratulating him on his election win, we had a good chinwag while waiting on my bags to hit the carousel downstairs.

I had one of my best mates pick me up from the tin crow depot and after a quick stop for essentials at me ol’ China plate – Dan Murphy, I was blowing the froth off a couple of coldies with my neighbour Pete by knock off time of 5PM.

• TOWNSVILLE (Queensland, AUS)