Angaston, South Australia: Can’t find our way home

I was once a very bad disc jockey. I’m not saying I was average or that I had an occasional bad night. I was terrible. Don’t know how I got hired nor why I didn’t get fired.

During the week I worked from 6-9 p.m. but on Sunday nights I drew the unenviable 6 pm-midnight shift. Eugene, Oregon was a relatively small college town and I knew no one was listening by the time midnight rolled around. So by about 10 p.m. I stopped talking and played one long record after another — the longest ones I could find in the music library.

One of those songs was Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home. In an era of two minute pop songs it rolled on for nearly six glorious minutes.

It seems appropriate to play it again now because we received an email yesterday from Virgin Australia airlines telling us that our flight from Adelaide to Sydney has been cancelled.

So what’s the problem, you may ask. Just make reservations with a different airline.

Easier said than done.

There are now only two flights scheduled each day. Both with airlines other than Virgin. One leaves at 4:45 pm and the other leaves at 8:00 pm. In other words, if we made reservations on either of those flights and it got cancelled at the last minute, there would be no way for us to get to Sydney in time to catch our flight back to the United States.

I spent two hours on the phone trying to figure out our options.

The first call was to Virgin. They told me they would not return our airfare because we had cancelled our flight.

”We didn’t cancel it,” I accurately pointed out. “You cancelled it. And you’ve cancelled all flights between the two cities.”

After a bit of a debate, the agent said she would “put us in the queue for a refund,” but would not guarantee that we will get our money back.

As soon as that call ended, I got on the phone with my credit card company to dispute the Virgin charge. Thanks to the Kung Flu, its customer service department was closed, so I went online to dispute the charge. After inputting all the pertinent information and clicking “Submit,” I was notified that this part of the website is currently unavailable.

Sigh.

I tried to find out if it would be possible to drive instead. Unfortunately, each state has different Kung Flu rules and regulations and the drive will entail crossing from South Australia to Victoria and then from Victoria to New South Wales, so it’s very confusing.

One government department tells you to call another government department because they will surely know, but they don’t. So the second department tells you to call yet a third government department, but they don’t know either.

Jamie came up with the idea of calling the auto club. They kept me on hold for thirty minutes before I finally gave up.

I contacted our rental car company. Surely they would have the latest info. Here’s what they told me:

Nobody appears confident in giving me any solid confirmation that crossing interstate borders is going to be drama free. The common comment is that the rules are continuously changing. I have however heard further talks on the relaxing of restrictions which makes me think that you would be ok to drive interstate although this is only an assumption. I was really hoping that you’d be able to obtain far more clarity from the police. It looks like even the police are being careful what they say. 

If you do end up embarking on the road trip, be sure to keep me updated via email!

Bottom line: All we can do is hope for more clarity before our departure date arrives. Otherwise we’ll take off for Sydney without knowing if we’ll actually be allowed to get there.