Arrived in Malta

 I left Cbr airport at 8 am Fri and arrived at Malta airport at 12 noon on Saturday, Malta time (8hrs behind) after 4 flights. Overall a smooth experience but with lots of oddities along the way.  Leaving Melbourne international airport now you go through those automatic passport controls. No matter which way I put my passport onto the machine,,it beeped rudely at me and said try again. After several of these messages it changed to ' find a real person' or words to that effect.  My mind raced ahead, of course, along a negative  route.  It took a little while for the real person to discover that  the machines had been programmed to reject people who arrived before  4hrs before the flight leaves ( or maybe check in).  I wasn't going away.  So explained it was the  2nd of 4 flights, I was not young any more and wanted to sit quietly , something about I had to be early because lots of mid dayish flights out of Canberra get cancelled, blah blah.blah, blah . she said ' wait there' and disappeared.  After a long while she returned  said 'it's sorted' . Which it was. I went straight to the Sing Air lounge only to find that it was not open either.   There was an American Express  lounge next door. Nothing ventured,... I thought. And gave the door lady some version of  my 'No longer young' spiel.' Which worked. 

In Singapore airport I discovered that the plane I was booked on was actually going onto New York.   A bit later, I found i was sitting in the  lounge next to a guy from NY who said he was going to NY, had the same flight number on his boarding pass and i must be wrong because he said he was not stopping in Frankfurt.  "suit yourself " I thought. He took his belongings and grumped off saying he was going to check.   To give him some credit, he did come back and said I was right about his plane stopping in Frankfurt. But he went onto say that there was another flight leaving 15 min later that went to Frankfurt that must be my flight.  

To be continued. It's bedtime.