There is very little to recommend flying across the world…or maybe that’s just because I always travel in economy. Oh god. Torturous. Small Z woke up at 4am, two hours before the alarm was set to go off. Our flight left Melbourne at 11.20am…and then stopped at Sydney, where we all had to get off and wait around for an hour or so.

My mother still uses a travel agent, and I haven’t yet decided if I want to strangle this person, or send her flowers. She assured us we would be sitting up the front of the plane with a bassinette. But apparently the plane was plagued with infants and we were put toward the back in the middle.

I felt huge dread about a 15 hour flight where Small Z had nowhere to run but our three laps, and felt even worse when our seating arrangements didn’t work out. Until M started putting some of our stuff on the fourth seat. I told him there was only three of us, and some poor bastard was going to have to sit there and endure hours of baby wrangling. He looked at me like I had grown another head.

“No. This is Small Z’s seat.”
“I don’t THINK so. She doesn’t get a seat. That’s why she travels free.”
He looked horrified. “What?! You reckon that she’s going to go all the way sitting on us? No way. That cannot be right. No, if that’s the way it is, I’m getting off now. I’ll stay in Sydney.”
“Der. That’s the deal. She’s free because she sits on us.”
“Then why has she got her own boarding pass and seat number?”
I boggled at him. I had let him be Fat Controller and take care of all the passports and other documentation – it seemed to comfort him, and I was happy to hand over the responsibility.
“Are you serious?”
“Totally.”

I was almost smothered by a wave of relief. We were then on tenterhooks as the people in front of us were told that, no, their baby could not have a seat as they hadn’t paid for one… I was sure they were then going to say the same to us, but it didn’t happen. God knows what I’ll do if this miracle doesn’t repeat itself on the way back, but it made the journey infinitely more bearable.

Small Z travelled like a champ, and it is luxurious to have a third pair of hands to play with her. I keep having to slap myself and not refer to my mother as my au pair. Ha! About five hours into the flight I was so tired, and determined to never fly anywhere. Ever again. But I managed to get a few hours of sleep with my head on M’s lap, and Small Z lying on top of me.

The onboard films were dire. The food was also dire. The plane was so old that the luggage compartments above the centre row of seats moved around whenever there were any bumps. Which was less than comforting. M marvelled at the agedness of all of the flight attendants, being accustomed to the nubile charms of domestic air travel.

The US accents leapt out at me, as did the slightly more formal way of speaking. It’s hard to put my finger on it. Maybe it’s that they say ‘certainly’ a lot and convey a particular sincerity. I will continue to study the phenomenon.

At LA airport we only had an hour and 15 minutes between flights. Not long, considering how much security rigmarole you have to go through. Last time I did a stopover at LA with my mother she turned into a rabid stresshead, and it happened again this time. She was freaking out that we were going to miss our connecting flight, and walked just short of running, through the whole thing.

She became even more frazzled when M was unable to recognise his bag on the carousel, and we had to stand there for about 15 minutes while he worked on a process of elimination. Whenever we had to line up again she would ask if we could go to the front of the line, and would be reassured by staff that were were going to make our flight with no problem.

Other than this rabid tendency, she is very good to travel with, except for her other habit of getting everyone around her ready for landing, poking her head over the seats in front of us, saying “Excuse me. Can you put your seat forward? We’re about to land?” She is the flight attendant concealed in passenger form. I’m fairly sure one day someone is going to hit her with an umbrella, or the safe-flying equivalent.

The good thing about our flight into New York was our arrival time. We got in at around 8pm, which meant that we could go to bed at a normal hour and try to slot ourselves into the different timezone. As we walked through the arrivals door, I saw a sign with Small Brother’s name on it, and my instant brain fogged conclusion was that the short, middle aged Italian looking dude holding it was my brother who had undergone some kind of unfortunate makeover. Wrong. He had got us a Very. Large. Car. in which to travel in style home from the airport, and the dude with the sign was our driver!

New York is slack in the same way as Melbourne when it comes to babies travelling in taxis – they don’t have baby seats, you just have to hold them on your lap and hope for the best, or take your own and install it on the spot. Which is why the very large car was great, because it had one in the back.

The driver had the accent of a purebred New Yorker, and chewed M’’s ear off over the 30 minutes it took to get to the Upper West Side. He had his laptop hooked up to his GPS, and this also enabled him to helpfully open a file containing photographs of all the famous people he had driven. I could feel M, who is a celebrity-phobe, shudder inwardly. As he drove off M shouted “I’ll be emailng you my picture!” But we’re not sure whether he heard.

It was lovely to see Small Brother again, and yet again be surprised that in person he is not quite so small. His apartment is gorgeous – high ceilings, huge windows looking over the road to an amazing park, and his furnishings are tasteful in the extreme. He and M bought a bottle of gin and some beer with which to toast our arrival, and Small Z investigated her surrounds, as I made friends with the couch. It was worth the journey, but I would still prefer to sail home.