travelling allrite

It's time for another short trip to Canberra! I use the corporate travel system to book a Qantas flight down and a Virgin Australia flight for the return leg. Then I try to assign a seat on the Qantas website, but I get an error. The day before the flight I check in on the phone. Fine, except no option to choose a seat and I don't like the one I'm assigned. So I call up Qantas and they arrange a much better seat over the phone. We leave the house only 10 minutes earlier than normal and I wave goodbye to B and Alex at Wolli Creek, then catch the connecting train to the Domestic Airport. A hurried walk to Terminal 3 and then it's laptop and tablet out through security. I arrive airside ten minutes before boarding begins. The interior of Terminal 3, Qantas Domestic, is bright in the morning light, but surprisingly quiet. There's a crowd queuing up to board the A330 to Perth, but most other gates are near empty. I like T3. It looks classy and you can almost believe ...

Every night I take our dog Kita out to do his business before he goes to bed. While I wait I watch the last few flights in and out of Sydney. They cruise overhead, mostly quietly, sometimes with a roar. Domestic flights, international flights out to Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Tokyo. I've been on some of those international flights. I find it near impossible to sleep, so I am inevitably exhausted for a few days at my destination, especially when there's no access to your hotel room upon arrival, it being too early to check in. Yet I am a creature of the night, so I still dream of those flights. The quietening airport as it winds down for the night, corridors of silence, a landscape of coloured lights outside. Taking off into empty skies above a city falling asleep, but still bright with amber and neon. Flight attendants moving stealthily through a dim cabin. Gliding serenly over moonlit carpets of cloud and flat seas. A sky rich with stars ordinarily invisible to th...