Its official. The text message came through from Virgin to say our Sunday flight was cancelled. BUGGER! This is not what we wanted to hear I can tell you! Up until we had hope that the volcanic ash cloud would move and our flight would, well, fly... Now we were there with all the other stranded travellers, trying to rebook flights.
We made an emergency dash to Target for toiletries and a pay as you go phone so we didn't rack up huge charges on cell phones or hotel bills. Then after stopping in at friends for 1/2 hour to activate the phone online, and popping to National Harbour for food, we got back to the hotel and into crisis mode. Stephen began the very looooong process of trying to get thorough to Virgin and I began to assess which clothing needed to be washed to get us through another couple of days. Thankfully I made the "wash all knickers and socks" decision, as when I came back from the guest laundry room he had finally got through (after about 3 hours) and was saying out loud words I didn't want to hear: "So you are telling me that the earliest flight we can get on is Wednesday 28th April?". WHAT!?! I had expected a few days delay and they were telling us that we were going to be stuck here for 10 days. TEN DAYS!!!! That was longer than our holiday had been!
At that point I went into turbo drive! I booked another hire car, emailed Rob to see if there were laptops we could use...everything that was going to get us working and mobile.
We walked along to King St to meet Morag & Simon for dinner. I was sitting in the bar before they arrived thinking "I swear I'm having palpitations, my blood pressure is probably sky high. Calm. Calm...". Adrenaline and PG got me through that night, and we had a great time. We ate TexMex and then singularly failed to get into the Speakeasy bar, despite Stephen's best efforts!
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