could hardly hear them. Then they turned their nerve calming muzak up to full volume and the plane taxied out towards the runway, the flaps gradually extended. The engines ran up to full power while we were still taxiing and the plane ran out onto the runway without stopping to line up and hurtled forward. Then we were flying. The ground dropped away, the wheels clunked as they retracted and we went up like a rocket. The ground dropped further below and the clouds gradually floated down to us several layers of them until the sun was no longer obscured. For the next hour I sat gazing down at the earth as we flew north towards a short stop in Sydney. The clouds gradually got thicker until there was no possibility of seeing the ground, but still I Iooked, it was a magnificent sight. To land at Sydney we had to go down through the dense clouds which were thick enough so that it was impossible to see the wing through the wfndow which may as well have been spray painted white. And suddenly we were underneath the clouds. It was raining, Sydney lay spread out below us and we flew over houses and factories for a long time getting lower and lower. I couldn't help feeling sorry for the people living in those houses. We landed and went into the terminal for a little while waitlng for the next leg of our flight. Already I was beginning to realise that plane travel is unnatural to people who aren't used to it. The last time I'd been to Sydney had been two years earlier, over twelve solid hours drive by car and by plane it was so easy that I didn't really believe I was in Sydney. And I found it even harder to believe that in another hour we'd be in Brisbane which is a good three days drive from Melbourne. One of the most attractive things about having Robin Johnson around (apart from being a good WorldCon chairman) is that he kriows all sorts of interesting little things that ean be got out of airlines, If I'd been organising the flights I would have,naturally just booked a flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles and that would have been it. Not Robin though, the tickets we'd bought were from the Australian East Coast to the American West Coast. And since Brisbane (where Valma's mother lives) is on the east coast we were flying up there for the night before flying to America the next day. Ths flight was in a different plane but we had the same seats. Up at cruise altitude there were mainly only clouds to be seen but it was approaching evening so it was getting too dark outside to see anything. A few minutes before we were to land the cabin lights were turned down and we had a magnificent view of the lights of Brisbane. We flew over the Pacific Ocean a mile or two from the coast so the whole landscape was lit up until it was suddenly cut off at the beach. As we came down lower and over the industrial area we could see light illuminating the factories, refineries and tank farms. There was a parallel row of lights which was the runway, we slowly turned towards it to land. The following morning I looked at our tickets, our flight (TE 556) was supposed to leave Brisbane at 4.45 pm but I didn't know what time the airline wanted us to be at the airport. So I rang them to find out and, boy, did I get a shock. The flight had been re-routed and if we wanted to get to Los Angeles on time we would have to fly back dowN to Sydney and then to New Zealand to connect with our flight. A couple of hours later we were crammed into the aeroplane seats on our way back to Sydney and telling each other how nlce it was of somebody to pay for us to be able to visit Valma's mother for the evening. By this time I was getting used to the idea of fliting up and down the coast so I read a book. As we taxied to the TAA terminal at Sydney an AirNew Zealand DC 8 landed, I pointed It out to Valma as the aeroplane we'd probably be flying to Auckland in. The international terminal at Sydney is around on the other side of the airport from the domestic terminal and I didn't exactly like the prospect of having to walk across runways and taxiways to get to it so fortunately the man at the enquiries counter told us that there was a bus waiting just outside the door to drive us there. There were a lot of people on the bus, more people leaving the country than I would have imagined. 9