7 May 2026 - Christchurch to Melbourne
Cross Tasman flights from Christchurch leave at the much more civilised hour of 8.20 am compared with the 6 am departures at Wellington.
Got safely through security - easy peasy with no longer any need to pass liquids and laptops through separately, or to remove watches and other items. I needed a patdown as the Xray highlighted around my left shoulder area - never mind my titanium hips and knee. Don't know what set it off - an underwire maybe?
That was so much fun that we took a wrong turning while looking for our gate and ended up back in the domestic terminal and had to do security all over again. No Xray issues this time. Allan achieved a similar feat at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, but his wrong turning was into the departures security area. I believe it was a bit harder for home to extricate himself from that spot!
We were on Jetstar with a meal ordered. The flight was extremely smooth even though there was a lot of cloud below us. A packed flight.
We landed in 6 degrees - coldest day of the year to date here - a bit of a surprise!
Ubered to our accommodation hoping for an early check-in, We were able to do so with a bit of a juggle - we are on floor 54 of 65 so good views - we are in a 2 bedroom corner apartment with a tram stop at the door, so couldn't ask for more.
It was well past lunch time on our body clock so we found a food court across the road and the nattering began in earnest!
We found a Woolworths Metro so we could stock up on supplies - a bit horrified at the prices there, Seemed higher than NZ even without the AUD conversion,
The trade off is that the trams and trains state wide are free until the end of the month to offset the high fuel prices. So we will get our trip out to Geelong will be a free ride.
A good sleep was had by all.
Haven't taken many photos but I don't know how to insert them so they may have to be retrospectively loaded when my tech expert gets home!
