15 September 2012

Final days in London

The Australian Paralympic team left London on the 11th of September. Here are a few photos from my last days in London:

On the tube - not all stations were accessible. Thankfully I had Lee and Jon with me to help me up and down the stairs!
Harry Potter was here!
London Eye
What time is it?
the Abbey - Kate and Will were here!
Couldn't get to Buckingham Palace (closed due to welcome home parade) so I had my photo taken with a photo of it instead!
In a London Eye pod!
Paddington Bear!
Our flight home was on a Qantas chartered flight to Sydney via bangkok. Business class is usually reserved for gold medalists but this time they also gave business seats to those of us who can't walk or weight bare (basically those of us who can't get off our bums to relieve pressure).


It was great! There are a few moments in life where being a complete paraplegic has it's benefits. The food was fantastic! I chose the duck option for both dinners - duck leg with veges for one dinner, then a duck curry with rice for the other dinner. For the breakfasts I had french toast with nutella and then toasted muslie with an apple danish. It was awesome to be able to lie completely flat when trying to sleep, rather than sleeping sitting up with your shoulders scrunched to not touch the person sitting next to you. I definitely felt alot better after 30 hours of travel this time compared to going there. Hmmm.. maybe if Basketball Australia had a bigger budget and we could travel business all the time! Happy athletes = better recovery = better performance on court! (my opinion anyway, I don't have a research study to quote/reference to back that one up)

So much leg room!
Horizontal is so much better!
Kudos to the Qantas staff who spent alot of their time pushing the isle wheelchair to and from the toilets. Also many thanks to the APC staff who gave massages in our seats during the stop over in Bangkok.

In Sydney, there was a small welcome home reception after we cleared customs. I missed half of it because of the amount of time it (understandably) took to get everyone with a wheelchair off the plane. The minister of sport and Tony Abbott were there and Ice House sang Heroes to us again :-) Afterwards, we took the bus to the domestic terminal, had about an hour in Qantas Club (breakfast being pancakes and toast!) and then finally boarded my last flight to Perth.

After too many hours to count I finally got home to a very excited Taj :-)



The "oof!" you can hear is me when Taj jumped up on me and the hand my camera was in gave me an upper cut!

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