Smooth landing

At midnight local time, after a 14-hour flight in which you got little sleep, in a foreign city where you now have a 9-hour stopover, after an extremely long queue through passport control, when the taxi driver taking you to your hotel is a recent arrival with no idea of where he is, and your motion-sickness prone son is spewing his poor little guts into the median-strip vegetation after a few too many missed exits on various roundabouts, you begin to think it would have been better to have waited out the stopover at the airport.

But actually, this was not the case.

Despite too long getting to the hotel, despite only getting a couple of hours sleep once we finally arrived, and despite travelling alone with the kids on the second leg home with no further sleep, I have never arrived back from Australia feeling so good. So completely fine. So effortlessly able to jump straight back into life over here.

It's possible there were other contributing factors - the sky was high and blue instead of low and grey, the starting of our new au pair the next day meant there were appearances to keep up, and the absence of a husband meant those appearances were all up to me - but instead of the usual blech of exhaustion and surreality of no longer being in Sydney, in just a few short hours I had unpacked, done a load of washing, and gotten the kids into bed. Without any yelling, even. And then, when jet lag woke me at 5am, I got up and started work. No procrastination, no faffing about, just right back into it.

Methinks a hotel stopover is now mandatory.