The Magpies Have Flown The Nest

Yip dee doo! While Elvis is busy leaving whatever building he seems to be frequenting these days, we’re copying his style and fleeing our black and white nest for a murder of crows (hopefully) in Dubai.

After being up at 4:00am and experiencing a seemingly endless and fairly ordinary day at work, I race home to grab my luggage (and yes, I did repack the whole suitcase in the early hours of the morning), load it into the car and wait – at first patiently, and then with an increasing level of anxiety – for Mary-Rita to arrive. Brisvegas traffic was working its usual magic and she was half an hour late. No problem though, as the airport isn’t far from the leafy streets of Ascot and we make it in fairly good time.

My body seems to have an autopilot switch when it comes to airports and I gravitate towards the Qantas counter before I realise that the Red Roo isn’t going to be taking us anywhere today. Renavigate internal compass and look for the Emirates counter, which, strangely enough, I've never taken notice of before.

It’s plastic ziplock bags a-go-go as we’re warned several times en route about the 100ml liquids regime now in place all over the world. I could seriously stab those idiot terrorists who have forced us to conform to these new rules. I’ll have a smile on my face while doing it and there's not a court on the planet that would convict me. Here’s a stockmarket tip – buy shares in Glad – you’ll be mighty glad you did, as these people are going to make a killing on the supply and demand scale. Here’s another tip – lipstick is considered a liquid and the security people aren’t thrilled when a girl has about 76 of them in various shades skulking around the bottom of the handbag. Go figure. Guess who forgot to read the whole brochure?

My friend Murphy must have been lurking about as usual, because (as usual) I was the person 'selected at random' to have the 'extra' security check for explosives. I must look like an inherently evil Cruella de Vil type girl, as these people just love to pick on me. On my world trip in 2006, we went through 27 flight sectors and I was body searched on every single one of them. I'm no number counter by any means, but even I could tell you that a 100% record of instances of 'random selection' cannot possibly be considered 'random'.

These days, travelling has lost all sense of romance and adventure in between home and the destination of choice. Long gone are the days of the early 20th century when travel involved having trunkloads of monogrammed cases, hat boxes and assorted necessities wheeled onto steamships, aeroplanes or The Orient Express by white gloved footmen, as one prepared to sail serenely down the Nile, explore the darkest secrets of Africa on safari, take tea with the Maharajah in the Indian subcontinent, or stroll down the Champs Elysée in search of one’s next lover. Despite forecasts to the contrary, travel in the 21st century unfortunately does NOT involve meeting George Jetson, Jane his wife, his boy Elroy, or daughter Judy, and definitely not Astro the dog on space age conveyor belts and funky flying cars in the pristine oxygen-deprived stratosphere of the heavens. It involves miniscule travel cases shrink-wrapped in plastic, queuing for centuries in sterile airport lounges, overworked airport staff and cabin crew and disgruntled passengers suddenly suffering unpleasant body odour after being forcibly separated from their favourite perfumes, deodorants and toothpaste.

Luckily for us, we managed to fit our evil, potential-bomb-making-plane-destroying substances inside the Glad bag and we were good to go. Even more luckily for us, I inadvertently mistook a senior pilot for a security guard (mental note to self – book an appointment at the optometrist) and sashayed up to him to find out where I could find a stash of plastic bags. Well, your man was very forgiving under the circumstances and we chatted away to him for awhile before heading of downstairs to the duty-free stores and currency exchange counters. We ran into the pilot again, and this time he’d brought friends, so Mary-Rita and I were graced with the presence of three lovely aviators buying us coffees while we waited to board our flight. Off to a great start so far.

As we got onto the plane, we met the first of our Collingwood group – Cliff and Nathan. These are Gold Coast boys who were immediately identifiable by their Pies jackets and black and white paraphernalia. I had on my Pies polo shirt so it wasn’t too hard to figure out that we were headed for the same destination. We got separated from Cliff and Nathan though and didn’t see them again on the plane.

Mary-Rita and I were exceptionally fortunate to have been seated at either end of an aisle with empty seats between us so we could stretch out and make ourselves comfortable.

Flying is dead boring so there’s no point describing it. Suffice to say that we’re now in Singapore on our stopover, where we meet two more of our group – Grant and Peter – as we headed on our mission to the duty free stores. We struck up some conversation and discovered that we weren’t sitting too far away from each other.

So, Mary-Rita and I are outnumbered by the Y chromosomes 4-2 – which I guess is pretty standard odds when dealing with a footy crowd.

This is going to be very interesting indeed.

Back on the plane for the second sector and try to get some sleep before waking up in the Middle East.

Good night and good luck.