What A Palaver

“Go to Tasmania!” They said. You’ll love it!” So we booked a trip, and set out.

Our first flight was to Sydney, at 6.05 in the morning. We rose well before the lark, and a pre-booked Uber took us to the airport for 3:00, the suggested time for international flights. Wellington Airport is open at 3:00am, but there’s no-one there. Once we’d checked in, we couldn’t drop our bags at the bag drop, nor could we get a hot beverage. At 4:00am, things started to move and we could finally begin getting under way. We made our way through Security and tried our luck at the Air New Zealand lounge, but because we were flying Qantas (for reasons), we couldn’t get in, even though we had vouchers on our phones. Bah! Unfortunately, there’s not much in Wellington’s International departure lounge, just a Subway and a Mojo, so we made do with tea and coffee and crosswords. We could’ve had an extra hour in bed, though.

Our flight had already been delayed, but at around 6:00 a security guard informed us that there’d been a “security incident” and everyone would need to go through security again. What? Yes, two planeloads of people, who’d all gone through security at a leisurely pace because there weren’t any other people around, suddenly had to do a rush hour scenario. What the “event” was, was never divulged, but I suspect one of the security staff fell asleep when they were meant to be watching the x-ray machine, or something daft like that.

By the time all this had gone through, we were over an hour late getting into the air. This, of course, meant that we hit Sydney at peak time, and were circling over the sea for another 40 minutes before we could land. We’d missed our connecting flight to Hobart. The captain had advised people on our flight (and others) to check the Qantas app, and, yes, once we were reconnected to airport wi-fi we confirmed that our flight was rearranged. But what’s that feint writing at the bottom? “This flight is operated by JetStar”. Yes, they’d booked us onto another flight, but they’d downgraded us to ShitStar in the process. Fortunately that flight managed to take off and land on time (unusual for them), and we picked up our hire car, and found our way to Hadley’s Orient Hotel in the heart of Hobart.

Hadley’s is a Victorian era hotel that’s been around since, like forever. The décor reflects this and it has a lot of period features. The restaurant menu looks good as well, but unfortunately I’d already booked Rockwall for tonight, and the hotel restaurant is closed on Sunday and Monday, i.e. the remainder of our stay here. We’ll just have to find somewhere else to amuse us for the next two nights.

Rockwall is about a 10 minute walk from our hotel, although we took longer as we checked out the area around the waterside. There are a lot of bars and restaurants there so we'll explore further. Rockwall seems to be among the better of them, and we had calamari, Bruny Bay oysters, stuffed chicken and a filet mignon, by which time we were too stuffed to go for puddings. As our internal clocks were still two hours ahead of local time we headed back for an early night.