Thursday, 5 December 2013 Cairns > Kansai International > Kobe

Kobe Night.jpgWhile it's always nice to sleep in, disturbing dreams involving intricate manoeuvres across a landscape that bore a resemblance to a rectangular Tonle Sap are something you're not keen to go back to after you've got up for the regular early morning drink of water.

I tried, but around four-thirty, with no sign of somnolence I turned my thoughts to The Whys and Wherefores of this little excursion. Sometimes it works, and you find yourself nodding off again, but when it doesn't at least you're in a position to deliver a coherent narrative.

Tapping that out, once I'd surrendered to the inevitable around five, took me past six-thirty on a morning where the early agenda was based around reallocating the contents of two suitcases around a backpack, a carry on bag and the two items that had previously carried everything.

From there, having liberated the travelling clobber from the back pack and replaced it with a jumper and a travelling pillow it was time to take a turn through the shower and wait until Madam had done the same.

A bit more moving and stowing and the inevitable fussing over detail wasn't enough to get us to departure time, so a session involving a tag team approach to the complimentary WiFi was needed before we checked out.

The Possum had been booked into a medium term car park, and we were supposed to lob there around nine-thirty, which explains the need to kill a bit of time.

We headed out around five past, starting by ferrying everything to the car, checking out and negotiating our way out of a rather tight fit in the car park.

From there we set off to head along Lake Street, having conveniently forgotten the detour we’d encountered the previous afternoon. That produced a one block readjustment to the route, but failed to create any problems whatsoever when it came to finding the long term parking.

There’s always a suspicion that Fate is lurking around the corner fitting the lead into the boxing gloves, so when you’ve had absolutely no hassles booking The Possum into temporary accommodation, followed by an immediate shuttle bus transfer to the airport you have to expect something’s going to interrupt the steady flow from point to point.

The theory expounded on the way up by The Driver was that we’d have avoided the worst of the Japanese School Excursion traffic, but once we walked into Departures with a view to checking in, it was obvious we hadn’t.

The Flight Across

© Ian Hughes 2012