So this is it! This is what I’ve been longing for since the 14th of December, the day we booked the surgery. We were up early as we wanted to leave the place as perfect as possible for Megg, our house sitter. We stripped the bed and put the first of three loads of washing in, the weather looked ok so in theory we should get them all dry. I had a couple of little jobs to do, one work type job and a couple more in town, I returned home about 12 with a view of leaving at around 2.30 which we did, all jobs done, a couple of invitations to deliver on the way then up to Perth on the first leg of our journey which we calculated would take around 55 hours to complete. We met Josh and Louise and took them for dinner then they dropped us off at the airport.
Bearing in mind the fact that I have to leave Australia as Robin, arrive and leave Doha as Robin and arrive in Philadelphia as Robin I decided before we left to just wear Robin clothes and grin and bear it. I have been full time Stephanie now for a couple of months and to say I really don’t like going back would be an understatement but I don’t want any problems to hold us up so that was the plan so I drove to Perth as Stephanie so we could go out for dinner like that with a view to changing before heading to the airport but we went straight from the restaurant to the airport so I decided to stay in Steph clothes until Doha, arrive there as Steph and leave as Robin after our 20 hour stop over.
After arriving at the airport we joined the queue for check in, we are pretty early so the queue was not a long one, I scanned the people in front of me in the queue, I don’t know why but it’s something I do when I’m Stephanie and the first people I saw were my ex next door neighbours from when I lived in Black Wattle way, I couldn’t believe it, I haven’t told them about Stephanie which is probably remiss of me, they didn’t look my way so I just let it go but realised that I would need to talk to them as they were obviously on the same flight as us. We got through check in and went upstairs to go through security and there they were so I waited for an opportune moment and went over to them, put my arm round Val and Said “spooky who you bump into at the airport” she was shocked but pleased to see me, I said we needed to talk, she agreed and we arranged to meet at the gate.
We got a coffee and sat down, I couldn’t see them so waited for a while then I saw Val, went over and gave her a hug and she followed me to where Denise and I were sitting. She had pretty much worked out what I was doing but of course didn’t know the details and the reasons, she listened and was totally supportive, told me how well I looked and how much younger I look then we went to find Colin, he was sat having a glass of red with a friend of theirs who I met in about 8 years ago, he was also shocked but said I couldn’t believe how much weight I had lost since he last saw me. All in all a very positive meeting.
The flight started off ok, I watched a movie and we had a meal but shortly after that I started to feel hot and it rapidly escalated until I was just seconds away from fainting, it scared me a lot, thankfully two flight attendants came to help, moved me to a seat which had more room, gave me cold water and wet flannels to cool me down then sorted the the ventilation issue out which caused the problem, all the vents in the area we were sitting had been closed for some reason and it had just got hotter and hotter, anyway I was all good after that and the rest of the flight went without a hitch.