The alarm rudely wakes me at 7.30am and I stumble out of bed and straight into the shower to wake up. My husband shouts from the bedroom as he opens the curtains that there is a blanket of thick fog outside. I wonder why he is telling me this but answer ‘oh is there’ and rush to get dressed and finish packing my bags so we can leave on time. I move slowly in the mornings, especially at ‘insane o’clock’.
Racing out of the house we manage to leave for the airport on time. As we approach the top of the hill just outside of town and enter the freeway, we see beautiful fog laying low in all the valleys of the pastoral landscape beside the road and I think to myself ‘Wow, if only we had time to stop and take photos’. It was so spectacular that I couldn’t have wished for a better morning as far as photography was concerned. I mentioned this to my husband as we drive over a bridge giving us an awesome view along the river disappearing into nothingness, ‘that I had never seen such magnificent fog’. And he answered, ‘Yeah, it’s amazing what you can see when you make the effort to actually get up in the mornings’. This ‘dig’ at me was the result of my very late nights of recent times spent on the internet resulting in me missing most mornings.
I was oblivious to the fact that this thick pretty fog was seriously threatening my departure just over one hour from now. I didn’t realise this until the last possible moment, until I was walking to my plane on the tarmac (I was flying with Jet Star) and I thought to myself, ‘wow check out that fog, that reminds me of that TV show where the airlines are grounded because of the fog’. Then I thought ‘Fog, oh no, this could ruin everything’.
You see my schedule was far too tight in reality and had no room for errors, none at all. My plane was to leave at 11.20am and was due to arrive at 12.35pm, my mother was picking me up from the airport and we were to drive straight to the hospital to drop her off as she had to be there at 1.15pm. She was having an operation, that is the whole point of me being in Tasmania, to look after her. The drive from the airport to the hospital would take 20 minutes if all went well so we had a twenty minute buffer zone up our sleeves.
Of course 20 minutes was, in reality, nothing. Although my plane boarded on time it didn’t leave on time, it left 15 minutes late. The door to the pilot’s cabin was open and I could see them looking at maps while a member of the ground crew looked on, it didn’t look good. I was thinking, gosh if they don’t know the way by now, we are never going to get there on time. I was getting nervous but we finally managed to get off the ground and the flight seemed to take forever. Usually on the one hour flight you barely get to finish reading the in-flight magazine, but I finished before they informed us at the half way mark that we had started our descent into Hobart and that decent seems to take even longer than the ascent.
As we were landing I could see snow out of the window all over the mountains and valley floors, well it looked like snow. I had to ask the man sitting next to me, ‘excuse me, is that snow out there’? To which he replied ‘Yes I believe it is, and I am told it is only 5 degrees in Hobart also’. This shocked me as I really hadn’t given any thought to how cold it would be in Hobart, it just really didn’t cross my mind. I mean I knew it was the last stop before Antarctica and I knew it was always freezing down there, but it just never entered my mind that I would be cold down there and I certainly never thought there would be snow.
So as the reality sunk in that it was snowing down there and I was in nothing more than a long sleeved t-shirt, it dawned on me that I really should have given this trip a little more attention. But now was not the time, now, it was too late.
So the plane lands 12 minutes late and I forgot to allow time to grab my luggage. I try to phone my mother but there is no signal in the terminal. I look around and everyone else is having trouble and holding their phones up in the air to look for a signal also. The luggage finally starts to come out and I will my luggage to be one of the first out. Miraculously it works and I find super strength and grab that case like it was a tissue box and I am out that terminal door in a flash.
By this time it is 12.55pm and my mother starts the dash to the hospital. Somehow we get a good run and make it to the hospital only 5 minutes late. Don’t ask me how everything managed to work out but it did. Gosh remind me to never cut things that close again, it was far too intense.
But the drama was not yet over, I had to drive my mother’s car home, alone, a car I had never driven before. Find my way to her house, which I had only visited twice before, in a city I had never driven in before, down all those crazy one way streets. Then, I had to find my way later that night, in the dark, back to the hospital to collect her again.
Amazingly I navigated the roads well, found the house, released the dog into the elements and unpacked my bags. Then, I was alone, in that huge ancient, 100 year old house with nothing to do. The silence was overpowering, being alone was so foreign to me, I am totally out of my comfort zone and I don’t like it at all.
Hours later after dusk it is finally time to venture out and retrace my steps back to the hospital to collect my mother which I do surprisingly well. Mum is doing well but her pulse is only 45 so we have to wait around for it to rise a little. At last we can go home so I walk my mother carefully to the car which I have parked as close as possible to the entrance of the hospital. We climb into the car and I start the engine and put the gear into ‘drive’ to reverse out of the car space.
CRUNCH, as I look through the rear view mirror the car surges forward into the garden bed in front of me and as I slam my foot on the brake I am shocked to realise what I have just done. Mum, who is still under the influence of the anaesthetic, says ‘woops, never mind, try again’, and I quietly freak out as I select the correct gear and timidly leave the hospital carpark. Welcome to Hobart, Daisy.
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