Well I guess we should buy Lotto tickets.
Some of you know we have secured MIQ (managed isolation and quarantine) spots for the 18th October. This is no mean feat, as even a cursory reading of the media reveals. On “opening day” of the new booking system, the 20th September, over 26,000 wannabe returnees crowd into a virtual waiting room between 8:00am and 9:00am New Zealand time.
At 9:00am a virtual hand, possibly Maradona’s non virtual hand of God, randomly allocates those 26,000 into a queue. It doesn’t matter if you are first in the waiting room, or 26,000th, your place in the queue is the luck of the draw – or lack of.
Prior to this date, we register on the site: it is possible to register more than once if you are a couple, family or group, as each person in turn may take a lead. I register us as the Marshall-Wilsons and Scott registers us as the Wilson-Marshalls. We look at the dates when there are flights from Perth to Auckland – this is tedious: you can’t search Perth – Auckland, you have to look at every day in turn and see which flights are flying into NZ that day. There are only two flight dates from Perth before the end of the year that we can see: 18th and 25th October. We have always planned to come home around the end of October so the 25th looks good for us.
Match Day.
The alarm rings. It’s 4:30 am (imagine my joy), but in NZ it’s 8.30am. We both fire up our laptops, go to the site and enter our passport numbers. There’s nothing to do then but watch the countdown to 5.00am (9:00am NZ) and await out fate. When the random queue forms at 5:00am Scott is a surprising 2200ish and I’m in the mid 4,000s. PTSD means we do not remember the exact placings, and irrationally, are too terrified to take screen shots in case we lose our places.
By about 5:30am Scott is through the (non existent) door into the booking office, where the staff are invisible. The 25th is gone, the choice is Hobson’s and we book for the 18th October. I drop out to let someone else through. We then go to the Air NZ site and book our flights. We then have 48 hours to enter the flight details into the MIQ system or we lose our spot.
So our days are numbered – for this trip at least. Now comes the scramble to organise storage for the car and caravan for an undetermined period of time. Some initial enquiries are not promising. So many people from the Eastern states (New South Wales and Victoria in particular) are unable to get into WA to pick up their caravans this year, the storage facilities are full. WA has been so stringent in its border closures, international and local, who knows when we will be able to return.
We love our travels here and I would be happy to stay on if we had to. WA is good to us and we are both now fully vaccinated. It is immeasurably safer from COVID than almost anywhere else, including NZ at this point; there’s more chance of contact in MIQ than we have now. That aside, I do feel a bit guilty that we have an MIQ allocation when there are so many people in desperate straits who need to get home.
On the plus side, as we will be back in NZ within six months, the NZ Government won’t be clawing back our superannuation; I’m running out of drugs, so won’t have the trauma of getting them sorted here; my Drivers Licence runs out in December so I can renew that; Scott can go on the KTM motor bike ride at the end on November; we will be home for what passes as Summer; we will be home to meet a new great niece/nephew and excitingly, for the birth of a grandson; and not least, we will see many of you.
And we did buy Lottery tickerts – it’s drawn tonight and $30 million is up for grabs – we’ll let you know.
NZ826 leaves Perth at 9:15 pm on 17/10 and arrives at Auckland 8:20am. Yes, we will be in front of the plane having a large gin and a lie down.
It is a mystery where we will be put in isolation. We request Huka Lodge or Blanket Bay, but probably we’ve used all our luck and will score the Waipuna Hotel and Conference Centre.
We are keen to hear from anyone who has suffered through MIQ and can offer tips to make it easier. We’ve already thought of alcohol.
