My first summer holiday since … well, since the last time we went to Australia, really. Although maybe I did have a holiday in 2016, I don’t remember. No wait, that’s right. I got laid off in mid-2016, got paid for my holiday but didn’t have one, and then it was my first year at Planmeca so I got no holidays … and northern-hemisphere-summer 2017 was cancelled in favour of this Australia trip at the end of the year.

But I digress.

This was apparently my first summer holiday since I last took the Hindle Ladies to Perth (yes that is a different link to the above links), and it was our first time going there in the southern-hemisphere-summer since 2002. That’s pre-blog ancient history, that is. A lot’s happened since then.

The trip was fun. There were few moments of tension compared to usual. My nearest and dearest seem to prefer to save that shit up until they’re all under our roof over here in Finland, for some delightful reason.

We set out late on a … Friday night, I think it was. Wump and Toop were excited (I’m going to have to do a whole separate blog post of Wump’s photos, she took hundreds using our old digital camera that she has inherited but all I had time to throw into this post were the few from my phone), and were already asking how much longer we’d have to wait by the time we got to the first boarding gate.

We eventually settled on “we’ll board the plane just as soon as you stop flailing around and kicking your fellow passengers.”

All in all I think the flight went well. I don’t remember a damn thing about it really, except we were 6 hours in Hong Kong and we had Popeye’s chicken and popcorn shrimp and it was delicious. In other news, my pants and waistcoat are noticeably tighter now I am back at work.

Wump and Toop were pretty well-behaved and slept most of the way, which was fine. Poor Mrs. Hatboy has a Hell of a time flying, and was out of commission for a lot of the trip. She had also declared that I was in charge of all organisation, paperwork, and allied stress for the trip, and I like to think I discharged my duties quite well. The biggest fuck-up was our lost bag, but I’ll come to that in good time.

I have to say that it wasn’t all that difficult to deal with all the logistics, so if it made things better for Mrs. Hatboy I’m all for it. I had a super-organised portfolio of papers and tickets and stuff, with post-it notes marking each item, all in a plastic binder.

Okay, I took a lot of the materials from work. I said I was organised, not professional.