Well, Kelly and I are officially living in Perth, Australia now. We left on Tuesday, June 2 and arrived late on Thursday, June 5. Fortunately we weren’t flying for 4 days straight, but aside from our full day in Fiji, it really felt like it.
Our iternary was:
Monday – Calgary -> LA
Monday – LA -> Fiji
Tuesday – Didn’t exist
Wednesday – Day in Fiji
Thursday – Fiji -> Sydney
Thursday – Sydney -> Perth
The first hiccup occurred before we were even checked in at Calgary. We had heard that it is very expensive to send things via cargo and that the cheapest way to get things over is to just pay for your overweight and extra bags. What we didn’t realize is that while you can pay extra for heavy bags, at a certain point (80 lbs) they simply won’t take them. Makes sense, and I had meant to phone the airlines in advance to find this sort of thing out, but simply didn’t get to it. So there we stood with 5 bags, 1 which we would be charged for as extra, 2 which we would be charged for as overweight, and 2 which they would not accept. The fellow almost had us convinced that with another empty suitcase, we could get 6 suitcases on their way for under $1000. This didn’t sound half bad until he corrected himself. Because Air Canada did not have a baggage agreement with United Airlines, our bags would not be transferred in LA for us and upon checking in there we would be up against the same time of overage charges, and then most likely again in Fiji, and again in Sydney. So, this was turning out to be closer to a $4000 ordeal that we weren’t interested in. We managed to pick up another suitcase at the airport and get 4 underweight bags on their way, leaving the 2 heaviest behind in Calgary (luckily Kelly’s parents stood by at the airport after dropping us off).
So now we are waiting for our flight and we find out that the Air Canada pilot has decided not to show up for his shift. This delays our flight by 4 hours, in turn causing us to miss our connection in LA to Fiji. Regretably, we decided to have our bags pulled and catch a Monday afternoon flight out of Calgary rather than spend the night at an airport hotel in LA. I teased Kelly about having missed out on a day at Disneyland because of it. The whole thing was a mistake because they weren’t actually able to pull our bags in time so the bags went on to LA without us. Except, Air Canada couldn’t tell us for sure wether or not the bags actually made the flight until the next day via various discussions with baggage support. Even then we weren’t convinced that the bags would be there when we got there, but hoped for the best.
* Direct quote from helpful (possibly stoned) Air Canada employee on Sunday night: “One of two things could have happened here. Either your bags are on that flight and will be heading for LA, or they are not on that flight and will not be heading for LA”. You figure?!?
Turns out, the bags were there when we arrived and easy enough to collect. We spent the afternoon at LAX and boarded for Fiji at 11pm Monday evening. We slept most of the way.
Fiji was a great place to stop over. I am not sure that I would want to do it every time because it did somewhat complicate the connections schedule and I’m sure added a few hours to the flight plan, but it was definitely a good time. We decided on strictly R&R (it seems there would be a ton of neat things to see and do on the island). We plopped ourselves down in beach chairs and took in the views, basically from sunrise to sunset. I posted photos here.
By now we were ready for the second leg and Fiji to Sydney, Sydney to Perth seemed to go by a little bit quicker. We had an afternoon in Sydney so we took the train in and began the hunt for my new mac laptop. We didn’t make it far beyond china town before we ran out of time, so didn’t have much luck finding anything. The weather in Sydney was awful with wind and rain, so we didn’t enjoy much of the afternoon at all. That said, Kelly decided to leave her purse at the table where we had lunch in china town complete with our passports and boarding passes, so that made the adventure somewhat more interesting.
At last, we made in to Perth and checked into our first hotel. We only stayed one night, before checking into our more permanent temporary residency at the Medina Grand. The Medina has been good and they have set us up with basically an apartment suite which makes living a normal life somewhat possible.
More on Perth soon …
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