And the Winner Is ... Sydney

G'day.

We are back in Sydney Monday morning after our trip of about 36 hours. Having done cars and trains and boats and planes in the last couple of weeks, I can tell you that planes are the worst of the lot. No one will argue with that who has had the misfortune of flying with BA to London's Heathrow Airport.

Originally we were scheduled to get back Sunday night but our itinerary had to be changed because we were booked on a British Air flight from Barcelona, transferring in London to Singapore Airlines. And what's the problem with that, you may ask. Well, good old BA - which seems to have completely abandoned any hopes of ever being a quality airline again - has a policy that they will not check bags through to flights of airlines that are not their One World Alliance partners.

This means that we had to check bags through to London, clear customs in London, retrieve our luggage from the carousel, put it on a trolley and wheel it to another terminal in order to check in with Singapore Air. Then, of course, we had to again clear security, which would not have been necessary if we had stayed in transit. (And I should point out that going through security in Heathrow is one of the few experiences I have had where I start to understand what it must be like to be a refugee.) And that's why our original 2-hour layover was never going to be enough time and we had to change to the later flight.

Anyhow, we somehow still ended up having enough time at Heathrow to take advantage of the VAT refund, which is the tax-back plan for the European Union. She Who Must Not Be Named had collected a reasonably good set of tax refund forms during the Accessorize My World Tour 2008, and at 17.5%, it was worth standing in a couple more lines to get that money back.

Needless to say, getting money from governments is never going to be easy unless your're a failing bank, and they certainly did what they could to make us either despair of standing in yet another long line - or just miss the plane. Once the forms are stamped, we joined another line to get the money, and there they tell you they can only give you money for your cash purchases and point you to the post box to mail the refund forms for credit cards.

In other words, I was learning what it's like to be a roadie on the AMW Tour. I'm sure I could hear Jackson Browne singing "Stay" in the background. I calculated we lost about the time it takes to have two drinks in the lounge with all this, but it was worth it, I guess.

Anyhow, you're probably enjoying this as much as I look forward to other travellers complaining about their journeys. So enough is enough.

Now it's back to work for some. And back to not working for others. But it is good to be back, so sing along with me:

I'm always traveling, I love being free,
and so I keep leaving the sun and the sea,
but my heart lies waiting over the foam,
I still call Australia home.

. . .But no matter how far or wide I roam,
I still call Australia home.