Abort?

We heard our first fairly reliable (not confirmed) rumour of flights from Australia to Europe being cancelled. Allegedly, flights to North America are still OK.

I caught myself checking the web sites of the three airlines in our future. All of them are cancelling flights to the middle east, but none talk about fuel problems. Were we to bolt on Friday, a flight home is $2200. Next week, $4500. The week after, $8500. In June, only $1000.

This is without the benefit of any sort of comparison shopping, so it may not be quite that scary.

Were we to bolt, some of our accommodation is refundable, but none of the flights are, so it would probably cost us in the $10k range.

I think we are going to soldier on and hope for the best. We are headed to Tasmania ("Tassie") on Saturday. It occurs to me that it's probably better to be stranded in Melbourne than Tasmania, but, it also occurs to me that if they were to cancel the ferry due to lack of fuel, that might be the thing that sent us home early (otherwise we have 10 days in NZ and a week in Fiji).

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Yesterday we took a bus tour to Phillip Island. The (huge) bay on which Melbourne lies is Phillip Bay and iirc, he was the captain of the first flotilla of conflict ships. Tour left at noon and got back at midnight and was about 5 hours driving. It had 4 agreeable stops before the main event, the "penguin parade", a nightly marching of 1000-ish penguins out of the ocean to their burrows on Phillip Island.

The day in total was quite pleasant despite drizzle and being damp all day. The penguin parade seemed like an awful lot of faff for the sake of 5 minutes of cuteness. 2000 people jammed into bleachers on the beach in the drizzle and dark, trying to make out blobs of white as they scurried from the water. This day cost us about $450, of which about $150 was the fee for the penguin thing. My opinion would probably be totally different had the weather been better, but as it is, I'd have a hard time recommending this.

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In my scintillating discussion of Australian medical I forgot to mention prescriptions. According to Karen and Pete, they are not part of the public system. They may or may not be part of a private plan depending on the plan details. The government has a means-tested plan for people for people who need help with prescription costs (same as in BC, I think, at least in concept).

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