I saw my travel agent Gina this morning to select Singapore Airlines flights from Brisbane to London and Frankfurt back to Brisbane. I opted for premium economy, which is only available from Singapore to Europe, but not from Brisbane to Singapore or vice versa. Singapore’s schedule is ideal for me, particularly when I spend a night at the Crowne Plaza at Changi Airport. I can do pretty well the entire flight to London in daylight. The return from Frankfurt is overnight, but the flight to Brisbane is in daylight, arriving early in the evening. Gina booked the seats. I’m faced with filling a gap between my time in London and Somerset – rail travel being the obvious choice.
This is a year when I am due to visit the UK and Europe. I plan to leave early in July. I checked with Clive to find out if he is up to a visit by me and when would best suit him. He is conducting his Finnish retreat in July this year, instead of September, which rather threw me. He needs some recovery time before I appear, so I opted for arriving in Somerset on July 21. I will have to jiggle my timing around a bit when I book my flights.
As luck would have it, I was in Brisbane and didn’t return home until late afternoon on Boxing Day, so I missed the freak weather, subsequently acknowledged as a derecho, a more than two hundred kilometre wide, tornado-like wind front, by the Bureau of Meteorology, which struck parts of the Scenic Rim, Tamborine Mountain in particular, and the Gold Coast on Christmas night. I saw the full impact of the weather system during the two days I was on the mountain without electricity.
People couldn’t access their tank water, because the water has to be pumped by an electric motor. Driving around the mountain, I saw houses destroyed by fallen trees which had cleaved them in two, or with their roof blown off and walls collapsed. The trees which weren’t blown down, were stripped of their branches, something I had not previously seen. Along the ridge on the main access road, power poles were snapped or leaning at a crazy angle. The power lines were draped over the vegetation or simply strewn along the road for kilometre after kilometre. The power outage lasted for two weeks. There may not be another community in Australia with a population as… Read Complete Text