It has come time to move Basil further on his journey and send him to Derek Andrews in River John, Nova Scotia. Getting all that luggage packed has only been surpassed by the amount of cajoling I have needed to do to keep him moving.

Basil wanted to stay a little longer and tried to convince me to let him stay by offering up his coding services to help with my backlog of work. I am not sure whether he would be a help or a hindrance so the time has come to say farewell.

Knowing Basil’s love of the finer things in life I knew there would be one way that I could get Basil moving - the promise of a First Class ticket (don’t worry Ben it won’t be coming off your account).

You see, my next door neighbour is one the senior first class flight staff for Qantas and when Susan found out that I had a donkey that I needed to get on a plane she said that there was only one way to do it.

“I will take Basil with me and put him on one of the new first class seats that lay completely flat. That way he will have the space to stretch out without too many people getting hooves and tails in their face,” Susan was telling me. “And in first class we could always just pass him off for some old hippie rock star.”

So he is heading in your direction Derek! And seeing that the route between Sydney and Halifax International Airport goes straight through Montreal, I even managed to get him an overnight stop-over with Ben so he could get cleaned up a bit and maybe even drop off some of the baggage and souvenirs he has collected along the way.

So at 13:25 today Basil, safely under the care of the Qantas first class cabin staff, left Sydney on QF11. He gets into LAX at 9:45am on Tues 26th (just have to love that International Date Line and the fact that he gets in LA before he left Sydney).

And with another couple of hours to spend in LAX (Basil will just have to avoid the security staff this time) he then hops Air Canada flight AC798 to Montreal. Ben, you will see him around 8:45pm on the 26th and have him overnight (seeing that the last Air Canada flight between Montreal and Halifax leaves at 8:30pm).

Just before Basil left I managed to snap a photo of Basil, the DVDs and me in my office. I now just have to work out how to get my plant to grow again where Basil was nibbling on it.

Tags: montreal, basil, travel, tourism, australia, nova scotia, leah maclean