Returns to Doha and home.

Monday 11th Long haul travel part 1:

We woke to a Paris heatwave breaking thunderstorm and rain. Outside our hostel window the lightning crackled in sheets around the Eiffel Tower and the thunder rattled on for much of the early morning.

For Joy and me it was a mad run through the rain to the Metro and the journey to the airport. That mad dash had consequences for us much later in the day when we got back to Doha. We had thought that our tour was ending on a high note - for when we went through the final boarding gate there was a slight delay as the clerk ripped our economy tickets up and reissued us with Business class tickets from Paris to Dubai. The Business class travel has a lot to recommend it - especially the food choice and being able to stretch out and relax for the 7 hour flight. Back to the key saga. Joy had taken care of the key-ring with the apartment key for the trip. She insisted that she would take greater care than I would.

However, a woman’s handbag is not always the most secure compared to a trouser pocket or bum bag especially when she carries a fold away umbrella in the same bag and leaves all articles in the same cavity. Needless to say when Joy pulled her umbrella out of the handbag the key ring got pulled out as well. So somewhere in Paris there is a keyring with a Brass cat, a Ford car key and the key to our Doha apartment lying around waiting for someone to return it!

The result was that when we arrived at our apartment at 3.00am there was no way we could get into the flat. An urgent phone call to Steve O’Neill at 4.00am, just as the first prayer call echoed over Doha, rescued us from the humidity and heat of the Doha morning 38C and climbing to a mid day 49C. Our heartfelt thanks to Steve and Lynley for going out of their way at such an ungodly hour to help out a couple of careless and key-less travellers.

We spent the day repacking our bags, juggling the weight distribution, washing our clothes from two weeks in France, updating the blog, dropping photos onto facebook, and exhausting our hala card credit with phone calls to the family and booking the taxi for our early morning red-eye trip to the airport and the beginning of our long haul to New Zealand and a new direction for another year now that our Qatar contract opportunities have finished.

Part 2: The Red-Eye Special.... enough said.