- Go to Australia post only to find that Sea Mail takes 3 months.
- Air mail takes 10 days but is $250.
- Bump into Italian cyclist outside post office who insists your bike is made of steel not aluminum (question the relevance of that statement)
- Find out from him you can take a bike onto a plane for no extra charge as long as it is your only cargo
- Have the Italian boy explain that you can get away with two large backpacks and a surfboard bag as hand luggage when travelling with Etihad. (NB if the bags don't fit in the overhead lockers, play dumb and pretend there is something fragile in there and the attendants will take it to the cockpit)
- Go to bike shop in city to get a cardboard box.
- Carry box big enough to fit a person in along with bike back home.
- Begin dis-assembling the bike with a poor quality spanner (on a level with Mecano)
- Manage to adequately downsize the bike apart from the PEDALS
- Spend a large amount of time contemplating the pedal dilemma and end up breaking spanner in process.
- Eat a tim tam
- Consider getting drunk
- Re-focus and take the bike to a bike shop closer to home to get the pedals taken off
- Return home and face the box
- Re-size an oversized cardboard box to fit airport regulations (using broken craft knife, kitchen scissors and a piece of string for measuring as no ruler is available)
- Rejoice at the revelation that the bikes frame is exactly the same width as the regulation permits
- Package bike as only piece of luggage
- Throw suitcase away
- Try to fit portfolio and a years worth of collected ephemera in the bike box
- Fit Tim Tams into bike box
- Consolidate every item of clothing I own into hand luggage (discard underwear, year old anyway)
- face the impending dread of transporting the box to airport...
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