On Sunday night I returned from spending 9 days in Perth (Western Australia) attending the 29th Australasian Christadelphian Youth Conference 2007.

I had a truly fantastic time at conference, although things got off to a bit of a shaky start. The Qantas flight I was on to Perth was originally due to land at 9:20pm local time. Late in 2006, Western Australia adopted daylight savings time, meaning the flight would land at 10:20pm local time. Starting to get a little late, but nothing to worry about, right? Wrong.

The day of my flight (Friday 12th January) there was a storm in Perth, delaying all air traffic by at least 50 minutes. This meant the aircraft that I was flying on (which came from Perth) was late leaving Perth, so it was late to arrive in Sydney. The flight eventually begun its taxi from the airport nearly two hours after it was scheduled to depart. I finally arrived in Perth a little after 12am.

Still, things only got better from then. I managed to find the people whose house I was staying at that night (Don and Maureen), and they lived fairly close to the airport – around 20 minutes away. That night I had a nice relaxing sleep in a double bed. In fact it was so relaxing I slept till around 10am – midday Sydney time!

They were pretty nice people that I stayed with. I think they were a bit surprised how at how little breakfast I wanted. Had a nice chat with them. Before lunch I went with Don to help load some supplies that needed to be taken to conference. It turns out all four of their children were married, and on the committee. There was some cordial, chips, and frisbees that needed to be taken to conference, which they’d been unable to fit into their respective cars.

After lunch we headed to the conference venue – a heritage listed boarding school. It was about 20 minutes away from Don and Maureen’s house, although in a different direction to the airport. I arrived, did all the necessary registration steps, and spotted Jonners who pointed out where I was sleeping. The first thing I noticed was how hot it was! The temperature was in the high 30s, so I was a bit anxious about the weather for the rest of the week.

The accommodation turned out to be better than I was expecting. For a start, it was much cooler inside the old double brick buildings. After dragging my bag up the flight of stairs, I saw the common area – a pool table, kitchen, couches. It looked great. The dorm was divided into little cubicles with roughly 6 feet high partitions which offered more privacy, although there were open doorways etc. Each had a bed, desk, chair, desk light and several cupboards. The bed was pretty comfortable, and I could even fit on it without curling up like I have to do sometimes to fit.

I’ll post more about the rest of my week later.