I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00am the following day.  As I hadn’t had a chance to check in, I was able to get a pair of taxi vouchers to get home and back.  I only got about 2 hours of sleep though, as they said they would turn off the baggage processing system at 3am.  When I got back to the airport, I could see all the people who had stayed at the terminal spread out with airplane blankets.  A little before the 4:00am deadline, another announcement was made saying the plane would now be leaving at 5:00am.  Apparently they had needed to fly a replacement component in from over east to fix a problem found during maintenance.  Still, it seems it wasn’t the most delayed Qantas flight for that weekend and it did arrive in one piece.

As I had planned to spend a day in Melbourne visiting relatives, it didn’t cause any problems with the flight on to Hobart.  I had been invited to the “Ghosts” dinner, which was to start about an hour after my flight landed, so it was a bit of a rush to get to the university accommodation and then walk down the hill to the restaurant.

The dinner was pretty good, with organisers from all the previous LCA conferences plus the people organising the 2010 conference.  Unfortunately, I was the only one from the 2003 organisers able to attend.  It sounds like the 2010 organisers have things in hand, and the location should be great.