Day 3 - Arriving in Perth

Tiredness was kicking in as we boarded our final flight, Doha to Perth. This time we were flying with Qatar Airways, and although the plane was a tad fancier, the crew weren’t as friendly. Unlike the other flight where we had a bassinet cot to put Alexander down in if we needed, this time Alexander had to sleep on my lap for the whole 10 hours, so unfortunately I didn’t get much sleep.

I actually don’t know how I spent the time because during the whole journey I didn’t watch or read one thing. The latter is not so surprising. The plane did have these cool cameras so we could watch the captains view throughout the flight. I usually like watching the gps map, seeing where we are, but this wasn’t working so it was white clouds for me!

A lovely gesture from the airlines for these long flights is when they leave pillows and blankets on your seat, as well as everything else like eye masks, headphones and a toothbrush. That’s great if you didn’t have a thousand baby things too and they took up a lot of room so foot room was minimal. They also did come round with things for the babies but we politely declined as the last thing we needed was more faff.

I just ticked off the 11 hours, one by one and soon enough the words “cabin crew prepare cabin for landing” was said. Yeo, yeo, yeooo, not long now!

We landed in Australia at around 6pm and we were glad to see our luggage made it through Doha airport and arrived safely with us in Perth. We also made it through security with our secret contraband (Irish Dairy Milk) with Aoife waiting to greet us in arrivals with an artistic sign.

Aoife - eager readers will remember her from chapter 1 and chapter 10 - had sorted out a car seat from a local hire company so she was able to collect us from the airport in the car and we headed back to her apartment for a much needed shower, pizza and glass of Prosecco. She also managed to get a baby play bouncer for Alexander who was jumping at the chance for a wee play.

After a debrief of our relativity easy journey to Australia and all the latest Derry craic, i.e which Chinese does the best curry sauce at the minute, we headed to bed to try and get some much needed rest. Aoife had also sorted Alexander out with a travel cot which she borrowed from a colleague at work so In my best Aussie accent, ‘Goodday mate’. X