BurbleChaz

We crawled out of bed at some unearthly hour on Saturday morning and dragged ourselves to the airport. After leaving my watch at security (muppet), and surviving the world's nastiest chocolate croissant, we boarded the plane and flew up to Queensland. Allegedly, I snored.

After about three hours, the flaps went out, the gear went down and we descended. And descended. The visibility remained piss-poor. Just as I started to get a bit tense, the engines spooled up and we flew the missed approach. Whoops. Cloud to ground level. We loitered around in the general vicinity, waiting for the Sydney flight to turn up and have a go. They got in fine, so we tried again. This time the cloud cleared at about 1500 feet and we landed on the numbers. The runway is a bit on the short side, even for a light A320. Lots of reverse thrust.

On disembarking, our first imperssion of the island was the weather - cold and wet. Apparently, this is the coldest it has been for eight years.

The airport has an authentic tropical third-world feel. They only had one set of steps for the plane. The luggage took half an hour to unload, and was then dumped on the tarmac for the passengers to scramble over. Antigua does it better.

On the plus side, the Reef View hotel has everything we could want, the beer is reasonable, the food is excellent and it's ten degrees warmer than Melbourne.