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An airport is the worst place to spend time when your neither waiting for a flight or waiting to pick someone up. I wasn't sure if it was the tiredness or the two beers I had whilst waiting in Weathersoons terminal 4 but I had a "eureka "moment that probably started the planning for this massive trip around the world! I had just flown a nightmare of a trip, possibly the worst you could have! The type of trip to put most people off travel for years to come!
It all started when I left James, my best mate at side-bar Sidney where we had been staying we had a beer and hugged goodbye. I court a train from Sydney Central to the airport and made the flight in good time (as always) but my flight to Perth for whatever reason was delayed and then my bag was the last out so I very nearly missed my connecting flight to Qatar, but after some running and sweating more than I had done in a while, I managed to catch the flight. This was just the start of my problems; I landed in Qatar ahead of schedule but the flight to London was 15 overbooked! When I booked the staff travel tickets I hadn't counted on the fact it was the last week of school holidays before September, so I sat for around 3 hours in an over crowded, over capacity tiny terminal in the middle of the desert heat looking up my options on how to get to Norway Via Berlin, Paris or even Moscow which were all options but finally I managed to get the last available seat on the flight to Manchester. After sitting next to the toilet and a kid that wouldn't stop moving all the way home. We finally landed but I was called over the PA system to come to the front of the aircraft. Concerned I headed to the front where I was informed that my bag had been on the wrong flight and was sent to London, my original destination "no drama" I said as my dad had booked me a flight to London which... O leaves in 50 minutes from the other terminal... I managed to make the flight of course with time to spare… Well I didn't have a bag after all, but I was exhausted. I had to catch 2 trains between terminal 1 to 4 followed by a wait of 3 and a half hours for the flight to arrive… Which brings me back to the 2 beers at Weatherspoon's on that wet, late August afternoon.
I was trying to come up with a list of all the places I would like to visit around the world including the things I would do there including climbing a volcano and visiting Hong Kong that list went on to be the base for my "bucket list" of travel!
O and the story of my journey from hell didn't end in that Weatherspoons pub, after I managed to get security to collect my unnamed bagged dad said there wasn't any point going home for the night as I had to be back at the airport in the morning for my flight to Norway so he booked
Me into a travel lodge but when I arrived there was no hot water in most of the hotel so they wanted to transfer people to oxford which by this point I was ready to sleep in the airport, after some negotiations I stayed the night for free and had the best night sleep ever before catching my flight to Norway and starting my night shift as normal!
The big problem was, I just started this job in Norway which was paying stupid amount of money for a task that was really easy... I couldn't leave yet! The thoughts of beaches and backpacking evaporated for a while but was never that far from my mind.
My opportunity to travel came 4 months later in December when my contract in Norway came to an end and some of my friends said I should take some time out so that's what I did! The trip was booked and paid for less than a week later!!
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