Months of anticipation shrink to weeks, days and finally last hours. The Cervélo is strapped into the bike pod, padded with stuff sacks of bike clothing, and the assembled paraphernalia in the spare room jigsawed into the 32 litre backpack.
My good woman puts a sandwich together while I shower then drives me to Tullamarine. Now the anticipation dissolves into waiting and apprehension; protracted pauses while uniformed officials protect their territories and their livelihoods.
The Jetstar check-in guy looks suspiciously at my reservation, phones someone, then checks me in. Having established his power over me, he ignores the fact that the bike box is 1.2 kgs over the specified weight.
The departure board in gate lounge 6 tells me I must wait an extra hour there because the plane is late coming in from Sydney. So be it; I have a sandwich made by my good woman, always a treat after the predictability of my own sangers.
The misery of nine hours in a cramped seat to Bangkok is leavened by new fears: my connection time has shrunk. Will I make the cut?
A petite Thai Air France employee rescues five of us, but she and the other four disappear while security force me to unpack my bag. In gate lounge 1A the small Thai gate-keeper is forcing a long line of us to sweat while he makes a big man of himself.
Five hundred potential passengers wait on the tarmac for the Air France airbus to be given clearance. And the waiting is complete with ticking off by the second nine hours and 35 miserable minutes stuck in a window seat next a squat Cambodian whose body oozes the stale smell of the heavy smoker.
Neither anticipation nor waiting lasts forever. After 29 pretty much sleepless hours I wheel the bike pod into the Hotel Diana in Rue St-Jacques and all that anticipation, waiting and apprehension blossoms into a grey Paris day.
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