Author: Natalie
We were farewelled by Damien's family at Albury, where the weather was quite mild for an Albury winter's morning. The Qantas flight to Sydney was uneventful but with only two hours between our connecting international flight, it always was going to be cutting it fine.

The driver of the domestic/international shuttle bus with his wrong turns, didn't speed our rush to the international check-in counter, despite his erratic driving that sent Damien rolling uncontrollably up and down the aisle at every turn. Then when we did finally get to check-in, the clerk had difficulty proceeding our details in their system because we had come in from a domestic flight. Thank goodness our luggage was checked in at Albury through to Shanghai.

Finally we got through Immigration etc with only enough time to pick up a sandwich. We had to leave all the duty free shopping for another day. All that said, we just made it to the boarding gate in time for them to load Damien & his chair on before all the other passengers.

The in-flight services were good but I couldn't enjoy them as I felt nauseous from motion sickness for the majority of the 10.5 hour flight. I couldn't say that the flight was particularly turbulent but the 300 km/h winds outside buffeted the plane, which made it shudder like going in an old school bus over a corrugated gravel road. All this aside, we landed in Shanghai with the flight service manager bidding us a personal goodbye and saying that we would love Shanghai and would have a great time.