Tag Archives: New South Wales

Random Rants, Tales of the Trev

How a Bad Airline ruined a Good Holiday

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This is the tale of how a bad airline can really f*ck up a good holiday.

This is the 100% true and factual recount of how it took us 8 hours to get from home to our destination, yet FIFTY FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to get home.  All with two small children in tow.

We were travelling from rural New South Wales to have a holiday with relatives in northern Queensland.  This meant a 3 hour drive to the airport, catching a flight from Newcastle to Cairns, then being picked up by our relatives and driven the rest of the way.

 

Getting There

We were booked with Jetstar (never again!) for both there and back and booked well in advance.  Firstly we had booked a flight that left at noon, then only a week out they cancelled the flight and rebooked us on one over 3 hours later.  A pain but we could handle it, it just meant missing out on part of our first day of holidays.  We drove to the airport, leaving the requisite time to check in and reach our gate.  When getting close to the airport I kept getting alerts on my phone about the Gate being changed, which happened about 3 times.

When we got into the terminal, we saw our flight had been delayed by a solid 90 minutes, which meant we had to entertain our kids in the terminal for an extra hour and a half.  Funny how they never sent a phone alert about that. Because we ended up flying out 4 ½ hours later than we had booked for, it meant our relatives had to pick us up after dark and we totally missed out on our first day of holidays.

Kids truding to their first of MANY delayed JetStar flights

 

Getting Back

Jetstar guarantee’s on their website that all children will be seated with their parents/adult relatives.  I checked our seats online the night before we were due to fly out and surprise surprise, they had sat our 9 year old son and 7 year old daughter in individual seats by themselves in different parts of the plane, well away both from each other and my wife and I.  Two hours of trying to sort it out online resulted in a “get to the airport early and have the staff there sort it out” reply from Jetstar – thanks so much., how very efficient and customer friendly of you.

(picture courtesy of Imagur)

So we arrive at the airport a solid two hours before we would have had to be there otherwise, and spend a stupid amount of time with the staff until they can ensure our kids are sitting with us.  We then have a LOT of time to kill at the terminal.

Half an hour before we were due to fly out, they announce that – once again – our flight has been delayed by 90 minutes!  So now we have even more time to kill, and have two very understandably grumpy kids.

Finally, after being at the airport for about four hours, we board the plane and take off from Cairns to Newcastle.  Getting to the end of the flight, and I mean right at the end -they had announced our descent 10 minutes previously and the seatbelt sign was on – the captain comes on:

“Please be aware that we have received a storm warning and all flights to Sydney and Newcastle are being diverted to Brisbane”

The groan in the plane was audible, and much muttering and bad language ensued from the passengers.  We could SEE the airport from out of the window, there was nary a cloud in the sky!  There might be a storm on the way but it certainly wasn’t there yet!  We had been less than 3 minutes from landing!

So the plane turns around and we have another hour of flight to reach Brisbane.

Son: ‘Will this flight ever end Dad?’ Me: ‘I don’t know son, I just don’t know’

We get off the plane.  I’ve commented on how I’m more ‘Middle-aged Tired Trev’ than ‘Big Angry Trev’ these days, well, not by then.  Anyone official not being immediately helpful was not abused, but certainly spoken to sharply in loud irritated tones.  I didn’t go full Karen, but by Primus I wanted to.

My family finds some seats, and I get in the line for the desk that is arranging transport to hotels the airline has booked.  I was in this line for ONE AND THREE-QUARTER HOURS!  I have never been in a line that long in my life!  By the time I reached the front I was ropeable!  Thankfully my wife came up and did the talking to the girl behind the desk as I was standing back and audibly swearing.  The girl told me not to abuse her to which I replied in an aggravated tone “I wasn’t swearing at you or about you or even looking at you so how about you just get on with it”.  To be fair she was just doing her job, but she had a JetStar pin on her blazer which made her the enemy at this point.  I did however stop swearing and just simmered in relative silence behind my wife.

A full hour after this they finally bus us to a hotel.  We had left our resort at 7.30am, and it was now 8.30pm.  11 hours of travel and we hadn’t even managed to get out of the State!  Our kids are tired and hungry, we are tired and hungry.  My wife gets the kids in the shower and finds some children’s programming on the TV while I walk the streets of Brisbane trying to find a takeaway shop open.

“What the hell am I doing in Brisbane?!”

By the time we went to bed we had eaten nothing but Airport Terminal food and some pizza slices and potato cakes for dinner.  We get a message from the airport that our replacement flight will be leaving at 2PM TOMORROW AFTERNOON.

The next day they bus picks us at noon and thankfully this flight was only running 15 minutes late this time.  However when we get back to Newcastle and collect our car, we find out that the road we would have used to go home is washed out from the overnight storm.  So instead of a 3 hour drive home, we drive 4 ½ hours to my mothers-in-law’s in Bathrust.  We reach there exhausted at about 9.30pm that night.  We are now 38 hours into our trip home and yet still hours away from our house.

We wake up the next morning, repack the car and prepare to head off.  Only one problem, one MAJOR problem.  The Bathurst 1000, one of the biggest car races in the country, had been on over the weekend, and now they were finished every man and his dog was heading home, with most of them towing caravans.  One of the bridges that served as an exit point to the town was underwater from the storm, so everyone is trying to get out of Bathurst using the same route.  The whole town is gridlocked!  We kept checking the traffic app every 15 minutes, but it is still noon by the time it lets up enough we can get in the car and start our final leg.

The drive from our mothers-in-law’s to our place takes maybe 20 minutes longer than usual as another bridge in our little home town is washed out from the storm two nights ago, so we had to take a detour to get to our farm.  By the time we drive in the front gate we had been travelling for 54 ½ hours!  We were exhausted and beaten and after unpacking the car collapsed as a family on our couch.

Since then we have vowed to never fly JetStar again unless absolutely necessary.  We are realists, we realise that sometimes flight delays are inevitable and things happen out of the airlines control.  But from some rudimentary online searching subsequent to this trip, I’ve found Jetstar is notorious for late flights, more so than most other airlines.  On multiple websites they rate only a 1 Star average from thousands of customer reviews.

It was bad enough that we missed the first day of our holiday because they cancelled our booked flight, then delayed our rebooked flight by 90 minutes.  But if they had just left when they were supposed to on the flight home, all our troubles could have been avoided.  If they had even just landed when they were supposed to (I swear you could see the people on the ground we were so far into our final approach) instead of turning around despite the storm still not having arrived, all our troubles could have been avoided.  But because they were running late, and because they couldn’t be bothered landing a plane which was moments from touchdown, by the time we reached our State the storms had actually arrived and washed out the highways we would normally take to our home.

 

As far as I’m concerned, Jetstar can fornicate themselves vigorously with a pointed stick.  No wonder in 2017 an international survey ranked Jetstar as the worlds worst airline.  In my opinion a truly inept company on every level.  It would give me great joy to hear some irate baggage handler rammed some lost luggage up their CEO’s arse.

 

Have you had a bad experience with Jetstar?  Pop it in the comments below!

Random Rants

Coronavirus Crisis: City Slickers leaving Country Stores bare

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As the COVID-19 crisis continues and cases within Australia and particularly NSW continue to rise, its been considered a good time to be a rural resident.

Out here where my family lives we are a solid 2 ½ hour drive from the nearest capital city where the majority of cases are taking place.  So far there is only a handful cases of Coronavirus within a hundred kilometres of us all together.

As such people in situations similar to us haven’t been panic buying.  We didn’t all go mad stocking up on toilet paper, we haven’t cleaned off shelves and we haven’t gotten into fistfights over a bag of rice.  For the most part us rural folk have taken it pretty calm, and in small communities like the one I inhabit, you don’t take ever single item of a product off a shelf as the people you are depriving are your neighbours, your community members and your friends.

Yep, the panic buying had been contained to the big cities.  But now its not.  It’s hitting small country towns and its not small country town people that are doing.

It’s Raiders from the Big City!

An sight no longer contained to capital cities

It’s been amazing!  Tiny towns with populations of well under a thousand are seeing more new faces than they have in years.  And these are not tourists – these are food-filchers!  People driving out from capital cities to hit up every butchers, every bakers and every small supermarket they can, to grab whatever they can, and then return home.  One can only assume the candlestick makers will be next.

In fact it’s not just people in cars – it’s entire busloads! Buses pulling up at little supermarkets in one-horse towns and twenty people disembarking.  These people head straight into the local stores and come out carrying as many bags of groceries as they can lift.  These raiders leave barren shelves behind and nothing for the local people, who depend on these stores, to buy.

 

Is it greed that is prompting these people to come out and grab all the tucker and toilet paper they can tote?  Is it desperation?

Because no matter the motivation – it is NOT ON!

 

Big City people don’t get it.  Country people are not surrounded by stores where if one store is out of a product they can simply try a half dozen others down the road.  If you raid a store, then that leaves NOTHING for the locals!  These stores, due to their remote, don’t get restocked every day.  And if that store is empty, the next store is usually a loooong way away.  The town I live outside of has one small butchers, one small bakers and one very small supermarket/bottle-o.  Besides bags of chips at the servo that’s it for places to get groceries.  If those shops are empty I have to drive an extra 10 minutes to the next town which also only has a few small shops.  If they too are empty, which increasingly they have been, my next option is to drive 60km to Mudgee where the major supermarkets are in the hopes that their shelves are also not bare.  Should I have to do that because Big City people have depleted their own stores in panic buying and now are doing the same to us?

You know what is even better than a clean fridge? A FULL ONE!

This isn’t just in our area, this is happening all over NSW and Victoria!  Small town locals going home without any food for their families because these busloads of city slickers have come out and nicked all the grub!  And it has to stop!  Not only because of the effect on the locals, but the potential spread of COVID-19.  People are coming from places like Sydney and Melbourne where the virus is growing ever more rampant, and driving through town after town where the entire populaces are so far uninfected. I wonder if these raiders realize, or care, that if country people get sick the food shortages will only get worse since we are the ones that grow all the food!

 

So, I say this to you raiders.  DO.  NOT.  COME.  HERE!  You are not welcome!  You take all our food and risk infecting us all!  And why?  Because you all couldn’t stop yourselves going nuts and panic-buying out your thousands of stores until there was nothing left.  Stay in your damn capital cities and wait for the stores to restock.  Because when you come here and take all our food, we have nowhere else to go.  We didn’t panic buy, we were sensible.  And now we are paying for it because our cupboards are not overflowing since we didn’t want to deprive our neighbours of their tucker – because, you know, that’s what good people do.

So please.  If you are from a capital city do the right thing, especially these school holidays.  Wait for your stores in the big smoke to restock.  Don’t come and take all our food and risk spreading COVID-19 into rural communities that have managed to remain unaffected thus far.  We managed to make it through the bushfires, we as a society need to pull together to make it through this too.

We, your rural cousins, thank you for your cooperation.

 

Related Article:

Coronavirus: The Toilet Paper Conspiracy

Hobby Farming, Random Rants

The RFS saved our farm from bushfires and friends & family saved our sanity

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Despite, thankfully, not losing our home like so many other poor souls, our family was affected by the unprecedented bushfires this summer. We had to evacuate our home for an extended period – twice, with the flames getting to within 500m off our back fence and 200m off our side fence. These were scary times for us, like many others across the state. If it wasn’t for the RFS fighting the fires tooth and nail for months on end, I have zero doubt our property would have been consumed and they have our families eternal thanks.

Image taken from the cab of a fire truck on our road the night we had to evacuate. (Photo Credit: R. Oldfield – NSW RFS)

These fires affected our entire family unit. We had to cancel our sons birthday party and all my wifes family coming for Christmas. We had to spend Xmas itself at relatives homes instead of in our own. We had to tear our farm apart to try and make it as fireproof as possible, and we are still now trying to put it back together. We had all our most treasured personal belonging stashed in three other people’s homes and likewise for our animals three more. We stressed and fretted and on one night drove for our lives as the police came down our road on their loudspeaker ordering people to evacuate, our animals and children in tow. We sat up until 1am at my mother-in-laws house watching the reports come in about a house destroyed on our road, wondering if it was ours and if we would have a home to return to.  We consider ourselves fortunate that all we lost in the end was a few fridges and a deep freezer full of food (a waste of good ducks though).

So yes, we were much luckier than many, but the NSW fire season was truly a horrible month for our family.

 

So the RFS saved our home, but what saved our sanity? Easy to answer – community, friends and family. Without these people my wife and I would have descended into madness long ago, and ours is a tale of how people pulling together made what was a terrible experience so much less worse than it could have been.

 

Here are some of the examples of how we were helped by truly wonderful people:

 

Community & Emergency Workers

*The Grader Drivers that came to our property on two separate occasions and put in fire break lines everywhere they could, in an effort to stop any grassfires that might make it in onto our land.

*The local branch of the RFS, who provided constant updates and were always able to answer any questions we sent to them, even at 2am while our road burned.

*The local member who posted constant updates and videos about what the fires were doing in our area for weeks on end and was an excellent source of information. I may have been a Greens voter all my life, but there is a National’s member who has earned my vote!

*My sister-in-laws friend taking in our chook and 8 of our ducks for a full month and caring for them, despite never even having met us before.

*Our neighbours across the road and next to us keeping an eye on our property in case there were spotfires while we were evacuated.

Grader driver putting in containment lines in our back paddock

 

Friends

*My friend Jordan driving over a hundred kilometres and spending 3 hours in 40 degree heat evacuating all goods from the Transformatorium shed into the main house (we thought that the firey’s might be able to save the house but would probably let the shed burn if they had to). Then in the hot sun helped me clean out gutters, that had never been cleaned before, of dead leaves and other flammable material.

*My boss and friend Toni from work storing my 3000+ Transformer action figure collection in her loungeroom for an entire month, despite it meaning she could hardly move in that part of the house.

*Our friends Lisa and Scott taking our pet goats for extended periods on two separate occasions and feeding and watering them every day despite the heat.

*Our new friends and neighbours down the road, Bill and Lynne, feeding the poultry we couldn’t evacuate, even though it meant a daily drive closer to the fire front.

*So many of our close friends messaging us with comforting words and emotional support, yet allowing us the space to breathe when we had to.

 

Family

*My brother-in-law Matt driving over a hundred kilometres with his chainsaw to cut down every tree within a 5m radius of our farmhouse, then staying the night so the next day he could seal breaks in our guttering so they could hold water in case of ember attack.

*My sister-in-law Jo storing so much of our personal belongings, taking our fish for several weeks, and making us Christmas dinner

*My mother-in-law Noelene putting us up for long periods – twice – while we were evacuated, looking after our dog and storing even more of our belongings (my wife’s family rules!).

*Our children, so young and yet so brave. Being evacuated twice, missing out on birthday parties, missing out on spending Christmas in their own home. That’s a lot for a 4 and 7 year old to cope with and they both took it in their stride.

*And more than anyone, my beautiful wife. By my side we spent so much of our summer trying to fireproof a farm that had never before been threatened by flames and was a tinderbox ready to ignite.

 

Ours is just one example of how families and entire communities came together to support each other during this horrible time for our state and indeed for our country. If ever there was evidence that the spirit of empathy and generosity is still well alive in this land, it’s been well and truly presented this summer.

 

So to all our friends, all our family, all the community and all the members of the RFS, on behalf of our family

Thank you!

 

Related Articles:

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Random Rants

Bushfire Danger: Packing Emergency Bags

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Here in NSW we are facing an unprecedented level of Bushfire danger.  A Total Fire Ban has been instituted for the entire state, a State of Emergency has been declared and some parts of the state have a danger rating of ‘catastrophic’ – a rating that has never needed to be used before!

 

Living on a fairly remote farm that backs onto a huge state forest, our family has been very concerned.  So much so that we have instituted our own emergency fire plan should worst come to worst.  

 

There are plenty of official sites that can guide you through how to come up with your own emergency plans, and I heartily encourage every reader to visit the sites relevant to their state as well as download the relevant apps.  What I’m going to share here is some of the evacuation precautions I and my family have taken, in the hopes it may provide you with some ideas of your own.  In particular – our emergency bags.

We have several emergency bags packed.  The whole idea of these is that they are pre-made and ready to go, saving valuable minutes if you need to get out fast.  Our emergency bags are packed with such items that can stay in them forever – not items that we will have to remove a few days later because we need them.  Hopefully these bags will hang on hooks for the rest of their lives unused, but better safe than sorry.

 

Clothing for the day

Despite the heat, long clothing is essential.  Should you end up in an area with sparks flying through the air, you don’t want those sparks touching your bare skin.  So long sleeved tops and long pants are the order of the day and they should be natural fibres like cotton, not synthetics that have the potential to melt onto your skin.

Leather boots are also the most preferable footwear to have.  In our case my wife and I own heavy duty leather boots but our children don’t, so we would put them in their most suitable footwear and carry them if required.

We have a bag packed specifically with clothing to change into at a moment’s notice.  Again, every minute you can save counts.

 

Evac Clothing Bag

Chances are you might not be able to return to your home for a couple of days until the fire has passed.  So you will need a few changes of clothes, but taking into account you should not over pack as space in your vehicle will be at a premium.

For each member of our family we packed the following:

*2 T-shirts

*1 Jumper

*1 pair of Long Pants

*1 pair of Shorts

*2 pairs of Socks

*2 pairs of Underwear

*1 pair of Pyjamas

 

Equipment Bag

There will be specific equipment that you may need when fleeing from a bushfire.  All this should be kept together and easy to access if needed.

In ours we have:

*One torch with fresh battery

*One small fire blanket

*One first aid kit

*One tube of burn cream

*One pack of face masks

*One pair of fire resistant gloves

*One battery powered radio

 

Pet Bag

If you have pets you naturally are going to want to take them with you.  In our case because we have two pet goats this would entail hooking up the trailer.  But for most people your pets may consist of a dog and cat (which we also have).  So when packing make sure you have enough pet food for a couple of days and leads for every animal – you don’t want to escape the fire just for your cat to run away or your dog to go hungry.  A dish to put water in is also advisable.  

 

Food & Water

Chances are wherever you evacuate to will have food and water available.  But again that motto – better safe than sorry.  Have a bag packed full of food that does not need to be refrigerated and can keep you all going for a day or two.  Pre-packaged food like muesli bars and biscuits will serve you well, as well as bags of nuts.  Also tinned food such as ham, salmon, tuna and so on.  Take as much water as you can reasonably fit.  Because we would be taking a ute we can afford to take a 25 litre container in the back.

 

Misc Items

These are items that you don’t need to survive but will be incredibly hard to replace should you lose your home.  This includes forms such as birth certificates and passports, as well as more personal items such as jewellery and family photos.  What you pack in this bag is up to you, but one of the bags you may need to give the most thought too.  Also, because these are items that you can’t store in an evac kit permanently, make sure you know the location of these items in your house so they can be collected up quickly.

 

 

So these are just a few different suggestions for what to take if you need to evacuate and a possible way to have them prepared.  Again, I encourage everyone to check out the official sites in order to get even more guidance and information about the best way to go about this, but hopefully this blog will give you a good starting point on advisable things to pack.

 

Got any other tips on what to pack in case of Bushfire?  Pop it in the comments section below.