Having braved the early alarm, and made it to the bus stop with an unusually comfortable amount of time to spare, we reached the airport in plenty of time for our flight.
A cautionary tale: just because the self-service baggage check-in calls itself “QuickCheck” doesn’t mean that the queue of five times as many people won’t move faster. Kel and I started our long weekend trip time watching (from behind a “quick” queue of five) the people behind who were behind us but had changed to the slow line. We tried to watch them for longer, but they’d already checked their bags and moved in through to the security area long before we could tell what was taking so long at the front of our line.
Once we landed in melbourne and grabbed our bag, it was a quick phonecall to my brother; moments later, he picked us up, and then we headed to the Heathcote region of Victoria (just outside Melbourne) where we paid a visit to his old car – the Toyota Crown. Last time he’d been there, it hadn’t started, so the boot of the Nova was this time equipped with jumper cables.
Sure enough, the car was start-able with only a bit of extra fuel being manually added to it (I don’t really know enough about cars to understand exactly what happened). To try and charge the Crown’s car battery, he took the car for a bit of a drive around some steep, rock-filled paddocks, eventually bringing the car to an unexpected stop while trying to drive up a steep hill. Another jump-start later, but this time I was behind the wheel, trying to use the unfamiliar handbrake, clutch and footbrake. All I managed was a bit of a wheelspin in the mud, and to stall the car. Finally, with Mark behind the wheel, and me behind the car pushing up hill, we managed to get back to the Crown’s previous resting spot: all’s well that ends well.