While away, I asked Richard to take my car out once or twice to make it feel wanted.  The day before we came home, he took it out for a spin (curiously all the way to Camberwell), where it just (in his words) stopped.

As this was the first news I was given upon our return from our trip I was understandably a bit anxious, given that the car was left out on a busy suburban street.  However it hadn’t been there long and the area is hardly the slums so I expected nothing would be wrong.

And it wasn’t.  We drove out to the car’s location yesterday and I quickly realised that the battery was the fault.  I tried jumpstarting from Justine’s car but that didn’t seem to work at all.  Since the car was pretty much stranded, and Justine’s car had no hope of towing it, I called the RACV to use my membership for the first time.

Except that even though I’m a member at the RACV, and have their highest rating insurance, I’m not covered for Roadside Assistance.  Both Justine and I were sure I was covered by it from the wording in a letter we received previously, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

I paid their exorbitant joining fee and we began to wait.  I mentioned to Richard that we only had one set of keys so couldn’t possibly drive both cars home, to which he replied, “Why not take the key off the chain?”.

Yep.  Still jetlagged.

The RACV guy arrived after only ten or fifteen minutes and after jumpstarting the car by connecting one cable to the body instead of the battery, cleaned the corrosion off which was the cause of the problem — I’ve experienced that before, but only realised after he’d done it.

Oh well.  Car’s OK, problem’s solved, and we now have an RACV Roadside Assistance membership… even though we thought we already did.

Well, we landed safely a few minutes to eight last night. We bought our maximum 4.5 litres of alcohol and instead of using the ePassport checkin, we went through the normal way together — the ePassport line was short, but incredibly slow so we switched — which was lucky since we had to go through together to get the booze in.

After impatiently waiting for our bags we were faced with an incredibly long line for customs, but like about half of the other people there, we pushed in to make things go faster. Nothing was confiscated, though we thought a wooden hat purchased from a lady on a boat in Thailand may have been. Probably wise to have declared it, though.

We were greeted by what I can only call the “cheering paparazzi” as we strolled out of immigration; very embarrassing but it was fun anyway. I’m disappointed they didn’t have a badly drawn up card with our names misspelled somehow.

On the hazy trip home — we only had a few minutes sleep on the plane and had woken up at 4am Bangkok time — Justine began to freak out that she’d forgotten a Venetian mask that she had been carrying in a separate bag the entire time since Venice (about three weeks) to avoid crushing it. We stopped and thankfully it was quickly found.

We had a bit of a chat at Dad’s house and I showed a few photos and then I drove home where, upon pulling into the drive way, things went a bit strange. On seeing the exterior, and then the interior of the house, for some reason it didn’t feel like my house even though I knew perfectly well it was. Justine mentioned the same thing before I had a chance to say it so obviously I wasn’t alone. Quite a surreal thing walking around your own house, knowing the place intimately yet it not feeling like yours.

When I woke this morning (not that I slept much, a few hours maybe) the place still felt distant but a lot better than the night previous. Since we both couldn’t sleep we got up and unwrapped all our souvenirs; it felt very much like Christmas.

It’s three o’clock and I have just realised that I have not yet had lunch, or eaten anything except for two chocolates at all. Isn’t being a zombie from jet lag fun? There are a few photos I had put online at http://storage.bludger.org/images/trip/ but in my current state I don’t know if they look very good or not — I know the photos are fine but the processing might be a bit off, which is why they are there for now.