22:15, Friday 28 September. Sydney Airport

Our plane is over an hour late departing Sydney, and we are still sitting at the gate waiting to close the doors. We left home just before 17:00, catching a taxi to the airport. We thought the traffic would be bad during the Friday evening peak hour, but it wasn’t except for a bit of a bottleneck entering the Eastern Distributor off the Harbour Bridge.

On the way, it started raining, a storm breaking the hot spring day. We saw lightning as we approached the airport, but the sun broke through as we arrived at the departures terminal and a huge rainbow arc shone over the runways. I commented to M. that planes could be delayed by lightning, but the storm passed and was over as we left the cab and entered the terminal.

We’d checked in and printed boarding passes online, and the instructions said if we had no checked bags to drop off we could go straight through security into the departure lounges. So we did that, passing through fairly quickly as there weren’t very many people going in. However we both got pulled over for a bomb residue check, which took a few minutes.

We checked the duty free shop and bought some gin and Campari to pick up on the way back in. Then we looked for something to eat as M. was hungry. We tried the food place we ate at the past couple of trips, but they had run out of vegetarian quiches, and M. didn’t fancy anything else they had. We looked around a bit and settled on a nearby place that did pizzas and pastas and some other things. We got a spaghetti with tomato sauce and a margherita pizza. The spaghetti was really good, the pizza very cheesy and with a thin but doughy and chewy crust.

After eating we walked to the gate at the far end of the terminal and relaxed for some time as we had arrived fairly early. At the indicated boarding time we went to the gate and stood close to the entrance for the economy passengers. But we’d seen the cabin crew arriving and they were all still sitting around the gate area, not on the plane. I realised there was some delay, and we ended up waiting quite some time before anything happened. At one point they called our names to come to the counter, and M. went over. They needed to scan our boarding passes for some reason, maybe because we hadn’t checked in any bags.

After a long delay they finally began boarding, letting everyone on at once. Since we were right near the front we got on quickly, finding our seats in the front section of the downstairs deck on the Airbus A380. After everyone had boarded there was more delay, as the flight crew announced that “some people have decided not to fly with us tonight and their baggage needs to be removed”.

Now, we’ve finally pushed back and begun taxiing, an hour and twenty minutes late. Oh well, at least we’ll have less time hanging around in Dubai waiting for our connecting flight to Frankfurt.

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