23 June – 24 June 2020  

Our 5 – 6 hour trip to Paris took us through the beautiful beaujolais and burgundy regions of France. It reminded us that, as much as we would miss the people, we would also miss the physical environment that is France, the rolling green hills covered in vines, the provençale wildflowers, the hills and mountains, the blue skies and the incredible clouds. 

That was of course until we hit the outskirts of Paris where the weather was more ‘Londonesque’ than Mediterranean and the traffic came to a screeching halt.

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Nothing was open (being Sunday afternoon in France) so en route we had ‘enjoyed’ our final dinner in France, somewhat fittingly this was a homemade cheese and ham (mostly stale) baguette enjoyed at the side of the auto-route, completing the full circle from our summer travels last year where this was a staple. 

We pulled into the classy Mercure Hotel Paris CDG around 9pm on Sunday night, Ellie immediately impressed that we were staying at such a ‘shiny’ hotel for our last night here. Bonnie, whilst grumpy that he had to leave Magic and the pool in Lyon, also seemed happy enough to join us in the room and avoid the dreaded transport box for another night. 

We checked into our room, disinfected everything we could see (we were no longer in our largely imaginary, but comforting, Provence bubble here, and had convinced ourselves that the whole of Ile de France was crawling with covid) and opened the curtains. The view looked straight out to the largely deserted runway and over the Concord that sits on display there – further convincing Ellie that this was indeed a place of high class and desirability. 

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Our last morning in France dawned bright and sunny – it was the first day of summer and the country was literally warming up for a heatwave that would see temperatures in the 30s across the following week. As all our friends planned trips around Europe for summer, we prepared mentally for our 2 weeks in a consistent 22 degrees in a to-be-determined hotel in Melbourne. We definitely should have thought this through more and come up with an excuse to return in September! 

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We watched the news and the obligatory covid updates. As large parts of the world were recording record numbers of new cases, France was declaring success, containing new cases to a couple of hundred per day. Victoria, on the other hand, was seeing an uptick in community transmission (to around 20 per day) and there was talk of limiting transport or imposing self isolation on interstate travellers. We debated rerouting our tickets to Sydney but decided to leave things as planned so we could all drive up together after we, and Bonnie, got out of quarantine. 

Our departure from the hotel was delayed for an hour or so by Ellie’s last English zoom class. Despite the fact that reports were written and the school year was already a lock, Ellie insisted on dialing in and dutifully completed her spelling test for the week.

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(Side note: One thing that has blown us away this year is the kids attitude and approach to schooling. Most of the debate and push back comes from Jessie but in the end she always plucks up and smashes it out. Ellie however has been a machine. So self-motivated and always on top of what needs to be done and when)

We took Bonnie for a final walk around the airport precinct (even here the wildflowers bloomed crazily), checked out and then made our way to Goldenway for the dreaded dropoff. In one sense it was slightly easier saying goodbye to him this time, as the fear of the unknown was eased by the fact that this was not the first time he’s done the trip. On the other hand, this trip was longer. It would take him over 3 days to get home (a day of pre-departure checks, a flight to Dubai, a day in Dubai for more checks then the long flight to Melbourne) followed by 10 days in quarantine an a final day in boarding waiting for us to get out of quarantine). He looked about as excited as we felt as we assembled his box and dropped him with Charlotte from Goldenway. The last of our ‘going away’ tears were shed as we pulled our oversized van away from their offices. 

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From there it was to the terminal to don our masks (they would be a standard fixture for the next 24 hours of travel), load our 17 bags and 200 kg of luggage onto 3 separate trolleys at Terminal 2A and then off to return the van, leaving Liz and Ellie to manage the luggage. On seeking out their check-in desk, Liz and Ellie were informed that, unfortunately, the Qatar check-in desk had been moved to Terminal 2D rather than 2A, leaving them with a 15 minute walk juggling the 3 trolleys to get there. 

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We all finally grouped at the check-in area and navigated our trolleys to check-in. We had our story straight and thought we could convince the airline that we were within the rules, rather than be ridiculously overweight. Our 7 bags came in at 151 kgs, 1 kg over our allowance. We had 5 ‘carry on’ bags that, according to the website, we would not be allowed to carry on, so we could check in and include another 7 kgs each on our total luggage. We would carry on 3 ‘laptop bags’, a ‘nappy bag’ (for our 5 year old, who hasn’t seen nappies in ages) and a handbag large enough to live in. Sorted. 

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We didn’t get as far as negotiating our baggage allowance. The staff took pity on the fact that we couldn’t even push our trolleys around the winding crowd control barriers to the counters and took us to business class. They took our passports and ‘tickets’ (friends and family ‘standby’ tickets kindly sourced by Adam as a Qatar employee, saving us a small fortune considering the cost of flights at the moment) and informed us that our tickets were not valid and we would not be able to board the flight. 

‘Sorry, we are not accepting staff travel from Paris’ 

‘But staff are able to buy the tickets without restriction’ 

‘Yes, but we don’t allow you to travel on them from Paris’

‘Then why are you selling them? Should that be allowed’ 

** Gallic Shrug ** 

We got on the phone to Adam. He tried to talk to the staff. More gallic shrugging. 

You should buy a different type of staff travel ticket, we’ll accept that. 

Computer says no. That ticket is not available for these flights in Australia. 

More gallic shrugging. 

This was clearly not going to work. We would have to appeal to the one thing that these staff would understand and escalate. 

Adam got to work in Australia, calling his boss and his bosses boss – all at 9pm on Monday evening. 

Meanwhile we were working through contingencies at our end. We were advised by the ticket counter at CDG to use the website to buy tickets and avoid servicing fees. Website said no, and would not allow us to buy a ticket on today’s flight. The ticket office would, but would charge us 200 euros for the privilege. 

We were about to lose hope and switch horses onto Emirates (where, it appeared, we could at least purchase a (reassuringly expensive) ticket for departure in 2 hours time) when we saw the manager’s phone ring. We couldn’t hear the conversation but the body language was telling. His cocky stance waivered, then his shoulders sagged a little, then he regrouped and came over to us: 

Doha has agreed to make a special exception. You are welcome to board the flight. 

He was taking credit for making the exception himself, when he’d been given his marching orders by head office, thanks to Adam’s convincing. 

Our thanks to the guy in Paris was as genuine as his welcome to us, but we were incredibly grateful to be on. 

After the challenge of getting the tickets, the challenge to convince the check in staff that we were not hopelessly overweight seemed like a walk in the park, and soon we were checked in, albeit still carrying 10 ‘carry on’ bags (it turns out that you can carry on bags after all). 

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We were through. 

We made our way through security over the mostly empty terminal, carefully monitoring the kids to prevent Sena from licking anything (even through her mask, this would be possible. She would find a way). Shops and restaurants were closed. 

On boarding the brand new Airbus A350 aircraft, we were greeted by staff in full hazmat gear – top to toe in white disposable clothing, masks, visors and gloves. We reminded the kids to keep their masks on and not lick anything for the 730th time that day. 

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We made our way to our seats in row 42, literally at the back of the plane. We were basically alone. With only 100 passengers on board, the plane was only ⅓ full with plenty of room to spread out. 

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We sat down, held hands and said goodbye to France. The tears had been shed, and the overriding emotion was relief that we were on the flight and some trepidation for what was to come … both in terms of the flight and the joys of impending quarantine back in Melbourne. 

We started to drink immediately.

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Between the excellent service (it basically felt like we had a flight attendant to ourselves), the massive TVs and the need to remind Sena every 5 minutes to stop playing with her mask, the flight went by as quickly and easily as possible. 

Soon we were descending into Doha and transiting through the impressive but largely cordoned off airport to get to our Melbourne bound flight.

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More hazmat suits, more empty seats and another easy flight, this time 14 hours long. The lack of fellow travellers meant we could easily find a row of seats to curl up on and the flight went as quickly as these things can. Before we knew it, we were over Australian airspace and then descending into Melbourne. 

We were excited. No matter how hard it had been to leave France, it was always exciting to be coming home. After all the planning and the goodbyes, it was time. 

Immediately after landing in Melbourne, we were welcomed to the country by an Australian Customs Official announcing over the loudspeaker that we would be issued with a detention order and required to remain in a hotel for 14 days. Nothing we hadn’t expected but the idea of being under a detention order was somewhat disconcerting all the same. 

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(Note for non-Australians: the quarantine program is fully government funded (for now). As a bit of background, Australia has been very successful to date in managing the spread of covid, with less than 8000 cases overall and just over 100 deaths. Community transmission has been very limited to date and a significant source of infections was recognised as returned travellers. As a result, borders remain shut for non residents whilst Australian citizens are required to isolate for 14 days prior to joining the community. For a short period of time in March, this was ‘self isolation’, where returning travellers were asked to stay at home. Being Australia, this didn’t really work and there were many tales of travellers returning from holidays and heading straight to work or the pub, merrily spreading covid to their family, friends and colleagues. The Australian nanny state immediately stepped in, taking responsibility away from its reckless children and instead imposing a 14 day hotel based detention/quarantine for all returning travellers. Inclinations to escape (yes, there have been a number of cases) are rewarded with $20,000 fines and jail terms. Some would say this is extreme, but experience says that the ‘self responsibility’ approach unfortunately doesn’t work so well for Australians (Fun fact: we are also fined if we don’t vote, have to fence our pools, wear helmets whilst riding bikes and are breath tested frequently when driving our cars… Australia and France have very different approaches to managing personal safety and responsibility!)

As we disembarked the aircraft, we were escorted to a series of desks, staffed by nurses and administrators, requesting details or how we were feeling (fine) and any special requirements (5 people, 17 bags and 11 weeks of French confinement later had us requesting as much space as possible, a microwave and access to the outdoors). Fuelled by the horror stories of the Mandatory 14 Day Quarantine Group on Facebook, we were praying that we would end up in a city hotel (with access to UberEats as the food we were seeing looked awful) and decent sized rooms so we wouldn’t kill each other. 

Everyone we dealt with at the airport was friendly, compassionate and helpful, despite the trying circumstances. It was incredible that they could make such a difficult experience actually OK. (Side note here: We’re not one to talk up Australia, but everytime we come home from overseas we are reminded of Just. How. Amazing. Australian customer service is. It really is awesome.)

We made our way through passport control (more smiles), baggage reclaim (more helpful staff) and out to customs where we had declared that we were over on wine. They took one look at us, our bags and, no doubt recognising that we were bound for 2 weeks with 3 kids in a hotel, let us through with our extra bottles without further checks. 

We made our way through the back door of the airport, back onto the tarmac, loaded our luggage (literally taking up half the space on the bus) and we were off to the Marriott Melbourne. We had been on the ground for less than an hour. 

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It is hard to express just how good the ‘welcome and now we’re going to lock you up’ experience was. We are more than accepting of the need for quarantine at the moment – it is a small price to pay to control the risk of the virus on vulnerable people and the country at large – the prospect of being confined to a hotel room for 2 weeks is distinctly unpleasant. Every contact we had from the moment we hit the ground to the moment we arrived at the hotel was positive, and for this we were grateful. 

We had arrived safely. We were not sick (at least we certainly didn’t feel sick at the moment). We were in the centre of the city. Compared to a number of the other hotels on offer, the Marriott looked distinctly ‘top quartile’. We had come as prepared as we could be for quarantine, with school work, books, games, a Google Chromebox, a PS4, a bike and trainer. We were as ready as we ever would be. 

We got off the bus. 

We gulped in some fresh air, conscious that this could be our last gasp of un-air conditioned air for the next fortnight, entered the lobby and formally commenced our 2 week detention.