One of the madder weeks in my life

This week was a bit of an epic traveling week. For a while I have had a client in Australia and we have recently been talking about expanding the relationship. At fairly short notice they invited me down for a working visit. Happily, they were paying for the ticket, sadly they booked economy class. On Monday morning I found myself at Heathrow ready to take, what I expect will the longest flight of my life, the QF10 direct from Heathrow to Perth and 16:18 minutes after taking off from I landed in Australia. I could write an entire piece about how nuts a direct UK Australia flight is but the reality is if you are going to fly 13 hours to Singapore you might as well fly sixteen to Perth. The flight was great and aside from the two meal services they don’t bring anything round as they want you to get up and come to the galley for food just to avoid the DVT.

I only had one full day in Perth which was designed to allow me to spend some time at the Airport observing the operations. The Western Australian economy is dominated by the mining industry and Perth Airport is the hub on the operation. The mines wok on a “FIFO” (fly in, fly out) basis with staff working “X” weeks on and “X” weeks off I would guess that over half the passengers that pass through Perth Airport are traveling to a mining site. The airport is full of people wearing Hi visibility gear and working boots. The mines are generally about two hours flying away and have fantastic names like Christmas Creek mine and Tropicana.

I don’t normally get jetlag but on this occasion, I got a case of “second night syndrome” this is where you sleep well on the first night through exhaustion but can’t sleep on the second night. As a result of this I finally got to sleep at 2AM and had to get up at 4AM. With the observation done I spent part of Wednesday flying to Sydney a further three hours and 23 minutes away for a planning workshop on the Friday.

The third night I managed to sleep reasonably well and following the successful conclusion of the workshop on Friday I was free to what I wanted.

Having not slept well, sleep is a theme this week, I was up at 6AM to get to the St Peters Parkrun in Sydney …. More in the next posting. With the parkrun complete by 9AM it was back to the hotel, shower and off to the airport to catch Qantas flight 1 to London via Singapore. The first leg was 7:50 followed by a 1:30 layover in Singapore and then a 12:55 flight back to London where I arrived on Sunday morning seven days after I left home and having flown a mammoth 22,000 KM and 40hours 31 minutes.