We got up early, said goodbye to Trumpet, packed the car and headed to airport. I made a new friend when filling up the car with gas. Cool system to pump gas here – lots of trust. You pump the gas and then go inside and pay. So I go inside and pay and the guys says, “Are you from the US?” and I replied “Could you tell because of my boyish good looks and charming personality?”. He laughed.

Returning the rental car was easy and then things got interesting – all turned out well, but am very glad we got up and left early to give us extra time at the airport. The rental car return was next to the domestic terminal  which was good since since we were flying within the country. Unfortunately, it was next to domestic terminal #1 and we had to check-in at terminal #4, so we took a nice walk (with all of our luggage). We got to terminal #4 and that’s where the fun began. We flew to Melbourne on Emirates Airlines – an incredibly nice airline – and we are flying out of Melbourne on Tiger Airlines – a real cut-rate discount airline. When we got to the check-in area, instead of a series of counters, with smartly-dressed customer service reps checking and tagging bags, we found a series of kiosks were passengers check themselves in and a single desk to the side with two airline reps. There had to be 8-10 kiosks with close to a hundred passengers milling around and another 2-3 reps walking around trying to help out. We waited in line for a kiosk to get boarding passes and then the real real fun began. Instead of the airline reps weighing and tagging bags, the entire process was automated with computers and conveyor belts – and the mail conveyor which takes completed bags to the airlines was stopped, so none of the bag weighing/tagging stations were working. Over the next 20 minutes or so, we tried several times to weigh bags, tag bags, etc and finally succeeded.

Security went very fast – and somewhere Ryan realized that no one ever looked at or verified an ID for anyone flying on Tiger Air. We checked in by credit card, but never showed an ID to get boarding passes or through security. They did check that we had a boarding pass to get to the gate and finally scanned the pass before we got on the plane. The flight was short (1.5 hours?) and uneventful and I figured out where they took away legroom to make so much room on the Emirates Air flight. The person in the seat in front of me wanted to recline, but my knees were against his seat without no room to move.