We are off for a long weekend to Newcastle to visit the family.

An early 6:00am start, saw us heading down the highway to Brisbane airport for our 9:15am flight to Newcastle.

We got caught up with a bit of slow traffic around Northlakes, but it soon cleared and we made it to the airport carpark. After a bus ride to the terminal and a looooong check in queue, we made our way to the gate for a short wait before boarding our Alliance Airlines Fokker 100 to Newcastle.

It is only a 90 minute flight and the small plane is tighter than a full Virgin jet but we got there 😀

I had booked a hire car with Sixt and had booked a Kona or similar. I knew Sixt. have BMW cars in their fleet and I thought I would ask if we could have an upgrade.  I got such a lovely surprise when the nice man agreed that I could indeed have a BMW and he would do the upgrade complimentary!

It certainly makes the trip a bit easier when you don’t have to work out where everything is on the hire car.

The navigation told us that it would be a 40 minute drive to our motel, so I set a timer for 20 minutes, with the idea of finding the nearest Woolworths to do our bit of shopping before checking in.

We duly found the shopping centre at Jesmond. The centre had a number of  food outlets and we settled on pizza for lunch.  We bought some bread, milk and eggs for our breakfasts for the next few days and made our way to the Esplanade Motel in Warners Bay.

We had looked at this motel when we were here last and it is quite close to the family’s home.

We unpacked our bags and headed to see the family.  It is always great to see the little boys who are growing bigger every time we see them.

We had a lovely afternoon and dinner before making our way back to the motel. A cup of tea and a little bit of TV and we were in bed by 10:00pm quite tired after a fairly long day.