Recharge Complete

I fly out tomorrow. Back to PNG for the rest of the year. Am I looking forward to it? I would say yes. If you had asked me a couple of weeks I would have been not so positive, but now that I have done all the things I have wanted to do - and spent far too much money in the process (Sydney is too expensive) - I am ready to head back and sink my teeth into a new year.

The batteries are recharged.

As to the logistics of getting back there. I am glad I rang QANTAS this morning to check about my ticket. It all turned into a mini drama. The story goes that I had originally booked my flights return flight to Sydney using my frequent flyer points. I was to fly down on the 19th of December and fly out on the 7th (tomorrow). All too easy.

When the boss told me I was to come down for the conference in Brisbane. That was the first spanner in the works. I booked that flight down as a one way all the way from Lae and got the Uni to cover the payment of it. I was forfeiting my flights down on the 19th, but I was told by the QANTAS staff in POM that that would not be an issue for me to use the flights back on the 7th.

Ringing up today I find that this is not the case and I need to cough up 5000 more frequent flyer points because I am using the flight back out of sequence. Not only that it turned out that because I was never issued with a ticket - the POM QANTAS office was supposed to send me the ticket but never did, unbeknownst to me - I would have to go to a QANTAS Travel office and fill in a lost ticket form, and get a new ticket issued.

So off I headed to the office today up in the city in Bridge St and after sitting with the QANTAS staff for an hour, filling in forms, explaining what had happened, being told that this was an extremely messy case, watching her tap away into the computer, I finally got myself a ticket.

So there is no excuse anymore. I am off, back north, tomorrow.