This trip to Australia was with my Mum. We had talked about going to a Show – so this was originally the main reason for this trip.
Also, Kiwi Airline, was offering very cheap flights across the Tasman. From memory I think it was something like NZ$400 for us both return. It was a no fringes – so no food and not much space between seats and they were not good at staying on time. For this reason, we arrived in Sydney a bit later than planned. If all we were going to do was Sydney – that would not have been a problem – but after we had booked the flights and show (Miss Saigon) I learned that Ron Price from AIM was going to be in Melbourne at the time we were in Australia.
I had become the first Distributor for AIM in New Zealand back in May 1995 – so to spend time with Ron was a must for me. So to do it – we rented a car to drive from Sydney to Melbourne.
This is were the late arrival in Sydney worked both against us and for us. – Let me explain – we went to pickup our Rental to find that someone had parked their return car in a way that blocked us from getting our car out. Back to the hire desk and 30 minutes later the rental people said they had another car for us. It was brand new – straight out of the box – 10 km on the clock and it was a big upgrade to the car we had paid for. This was the For – the against was it was now 5.00 pm and the rush hour traffic was blocking all the roads.
Off we went – and within 10 minutes we witnessed a pileup – with a car flipping over – about 5 cars in front of us.
We had planned to drive as far south as we could tonight – so as it started to get dark – we decided to look for the next motel to bed down for the night. I should add, we were on the road following the coastline – so it was slower but more places to stay.
I cannot remember were we stayed but we were up very early and had breakfast in Bega.
We arrived at our motel just before 5.00 pm on the Thursday – just time to clean up before having dinner with Ron.
Next day – I was in meetings all day – and when we were having dinner again with Ron – Mum informed us she wanted to queue up for last minute tickets for a show in Melbourne Saturday night. We had planned to drive to Canberra on the Saturday. It turned out that Ron was a huge Show fan and said could we try and get him tickets too.
We were up early and because we had not planned to stay – we booked out of the motel and headed into Central Melbourne to get in the queue for Beauty and the Beast. Guess what, we got four tickets in the middle of the first row on the circle. I think the four best seats in the house. So back to the motel and booked our room back again. So now we had a whole day to fill in – so off to Ballarat to visit the gold mining village.
The Show that night was great – Ron had never been to a show in USA were he was so close to the stage.
Sunday – quick trip to Canberra and then back to Sydney on Monday to our hostel and the show on Monday night. We had an early Dinner in the revolving restaurant up the Sydney Tower.
Another great Show. We had another day looking around Sydney before returning the car back to the airport.
Now after all we had experienced we did not expect any more BUT when we checked in for our return flight – they asked us to go thru to the lounge and told us they would call us when ready. We did not have a boarding pass or seat numbers. We were the first names called in the waiting lounge and taken to the plane and were shown to our two seats near the front. More space between the seats AND we were served a meal we had not paid for. Not sure why – but it just finished off one of my best holidays and I know Mum was still talking about it years later.