This definitely feels like the longest month in history with all the chaos that has ensued. I was feeling very nervous the week after we went to Oxford, the last post I wrote, as my Certificate of Sponsorship was due to be processed/announced. Historically the committee sit and decide on the 10th/11th of the month, but there was talk that it might be the 13th so I didn't really know when I'd hear back. This was compounded by the uncertainty and stress of the Covid-19 virus really starting to spread through the UK. Each day we woke up to new news stories from the UK and Australia, and we were becoming nervous about the ramifications for our Australian trip. However after a busy week and after chasing our business manager a bit on Thursday, she came and found me in the afternoon to tell me that the Certificate of Sponsorship had been approved! Hooray! On Friday we submitted the allocation form that allocated the Certificate to me, and I headed home on Friday night ready to do the full application. 

Unfortunately part way through the application, we realised that the Federation business manager had not provided me with the school's licensing number required to complete the application. This led a fairly frustrating weekend - which was already planned to be pretty quiet due to the increasing spread of Covid-19 through the city. On Sunday there was the added stress of the announcement by the Australian government that all arrivals into Australia had to quarantine for two weeks. On Monday after school I headed straight home and submitted my visa application, and booked a biometrics appointment for the 11th April, allowing 2 weeks for quarantine but still hopefully enough time for visa processing before our flights home on the 18th - we'd paid extra for priority processing.

However as the week went forward, with stressful pointless days of distracted children as the government resisted closing schools, there was still news every day regarding travel restrictions. By Wednesday, there was talk that the Australian government was going to close the borders so after a day spent on hold to British Airways, Peter managed to pull our flights forward to Tuesday and we hoped for the best. On Wednesday evening, the UK government also announced that schools in the UK would be closing - although with a strange stipulation that they would be providing service for 'key workers' children. On Thursday morning we then awoke to the news that the Australian government were closing borders to foreigners at 9pm on Friday, so I called in 'absent' and we rushed to the airport. Unfortunately after an unproductive 6 hours at Heathrow we only managed to make it on to a Friday evening flight, hoping that we could rely on the Australian government's allowance that partners of Australian citizens could enter the country. I headed back to work on Thursday afternoon for a staff meeting where the head teachers ran through how we would structure schooling - because in fact, schools are not closed, they're just acting as child care centres for doctors, nurses, food delivery people and other 'essential' jobs. 

After a final day of school on Friday, I headed home at lunchtime and we made our way to the airport. We checked in to our flight with no problems and had an uneventful (albeit quite empty) flight to Singapore. It was in Singapore that we ran into problems. Despite having brought all our documents (rent agreement, shared banking, home insurance), we hadn't submitted a form on the Home Affairs website that we needed to (which, to be fair, we'd extensively looked for and couldn't find), so when the transit desk called Australian border force, they said that Peter couldn't join me on the flight. We missed our connecting flight and spent the next half hour searching on the Home Affair website, eventually scrolling through every possible form and finding the one we needed. We uploaded digital versions of all of our documents and received an email 10 minutes later saying that Peter was exempt and that was fine. Of course by that time it was too late and our flight had left, but we booked onto a flight for the following afternoon. The transit hotel was fully booked (of course!) so we headed in to a lounge for 3 hours, then wandered around the airport for a while. Luckily we stumbled across another hotel at 3am that had a last minute cancellation and we managed to get a bed for the next 6 hours. After what felt like not-enough sleep, we got up, quickly showered and checked out. We had breakfast in another lounge, then explored for a while - even catching the train between terminals that goes into the amazing shopping centre with a waterfall in the middle of it. Very cool stuff. At 10am we checked into our flight, with a successful call to Border Force, got our boarding passes and headed to our gate. Once again our fairly empty flight took off with no dramas and after a movie and a nap, we arrived in Melbourne. 

After being stopped and checked by immigration, we got the tick of approval, signed our 'quarantine address' document and headed out to baggage. Here we ran into our next challenge, which was that our bags hadn't arrived. We headed to the desk and found that they hadn't been on our flight. After signing a document and making a report, we trudged out to meet Dad, feeling relieved to be in Melbourne but also fairly defeated. An hour and a half later we arrived in Neerim South, waved Mum hello and after a small chat collapsed into bed.