Off to Melbourne

Our flight from Perth to Melbourne was a little over three hours long and left at about ten minutes past 1991.

Getting on this Australian domestic flight was easier than any boarding process I’ve been through in years. We were not asked for boarding passes or I.D. at security. We were allowed to keep our shoes on going through the metal detector. We did, of course, have to show our boarding passes to get on the plane, but Pipi ended up sitting next to someone who only realized after he’d taken his seat that he was on the wrong flight, so they clearly weren’t checking too thoroughly.

The other interesting thing about this flight was that there was no boarding protocol. I think first class may have been able to get on early, but when it came time for general boarding, the gate agent leaned over and murmured a few unintelligible words into the microphone, and every single person in the gate area jumped up and formed a scrum at the entrance to the jetway. There was no pushing or shoving, though. The process was surprisingly orderly. I got the sense that everyone except Pipi and I knew exactly what was going to happen and what he or she should do when they got the signal.

Pipi and I were an embarrassment, though. We were still wandering around clutching our shoes in our hands and begging people to look at our driver’s licenses when boarding started. We were almost the last people on the plane. If the process had been any simpler, we probably would have missed the flight entirely.