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Until Kristen had spent enough money (so it seemed to us at the time).

We flew from Port Lincoln to Adelaide on the Wednesday afternoon and began our abuse of Tod’s credit card by staying at the Hyatt Hotel, wrapped up in fluffy robes, ordering room service.

Got to Adelaide airport well before our flight, checked in and settled down.

Then hell broke loose.

The skies opened and lightening streaked across the dark clouds, as buckets of rain pelted everything in their rush to the ground.

The airport was shut down. Then opened - a couple of planes got away - then shut down again. And so it continued until our flight was an hour late. Which wouldn’t have been too bad normally - except our connecting flight to Japan was becoming less catchable.

We will make the connection we were assured. Several times. We sat at Boarding gate 7 watching the rain drip through the roof. Onto the floor.

We board the plane and are treated to a bumpy, scary two hour flight. We were lucky to be sitting next to a nice New Zealand chap who kept me distracted with his amusing tales.

We finally land in Sydney airport.

We did not make the flight to Tokyo.

Qantas ships us off to a hotel at Darling Harbour. We will be here for about 6 hours before needing to make our way back to the airport to catch a plane.

To Cairns.

It’s Kristen’s fault. She is a tourist and needs to spend enough money before she can leave. Luckily a few nice shops in Sydney and Cairns airport helped her to do that.

We get on a plane to Tokyo. It arrives late, but it does arrive.

Storms happen - that’s fine. Customer service on the other hand can be controlled. And amongst all this drama were incompetent staff who made our lives just that much harder. To change our flights to be the same one I had to ask the hospital to fax them my Mother’s death certificate. After a few fruitless phone calls, we finally managed to get on the same flight by physically going into the airport and meeting a decent lady who got approval in about 10 minutes. Unfortunately it had taken so long that most flights before the one we got were booked out. The icing on the cake was the twerp we dealt with at the check-in counter in Sydney, who couldn’t seat us next to each other. Fortunately the guy at the boarding gate managed it.

We weren’t asking for much. We had both paid a fortune for our tickets. We weren’t begging for upgrades or refunds. We simply wanted to sit next to each other on the same plane so that I wouldn’t have to go back on my own after what happened.

To the female cashier at Narita who took 45 minutes to organize my ticket, refused to get a manager when I asked and told me tripe about Australia being so far away (hence the expense), the people on the phone who had no power to decide anything and made the process much harder and the twerp at Sydney airport, I hope you never have to go through what we did just to take a 10 hour flight from one country to another. But you may find that being better at your job will make your life seem a little rosier.

• Make sure you help them all learn from this experience and let them know what they put you through so they can try not to do it to anybody else..  sure they are operating in a tough industry with lots of security, safety and cost restrictions, but they are still a service industry so need to learn how better to serve their paying passengers.  Given how much the tickets cost you, you are well within your rights to complain.

  I am sure that they get fraudulent requests everyday, but they need to have a better system for quickly weeding out the liars and making it easier to assist people with legitimate issues like you and Kristen.

  Plus venting about something that is under your control will make you feel better….

  T
  04/12/14 05:29 PM

• Quite a trip, wasn’t it? It made me feel like a 19th century adventuress. I’m so glad we made it home, albeit a bit later than we’d intended.

  Kristen
  04/12/14 08:20 PM