Tuesday’s schedule asked players and staff to arrive at the club by 7.15am.

By seven almost the entire cohort of 47 players and 33 staff had assembled around the gym and in the football department area.

Only one player remained outside in the car park. Taylin Duman was with his partner Claudia, cradling his four-month old daughter Ayla.

We didn’t have to get on the bus until 7.30am and he wasn’t going to let her go until he had to.

I snuck up and asked for a family photo and he was happy to oblige, but even then he couldn’t take his eyes off Ayla. The next time he sees her she’ll be at least five months old, an extra 20 per cent of her life lived. An eternity for any parent.

It was just as hard for David Mundy. He admitted to shedding a tear with wife Sally as he was dropped off. All three of his children gang tackled the midfielder in the car park as they saw him off. He won’t be getting ‘hugged’ that hard until he reunites with the likes of Lachie Neale on Saturday!

As we headed to the busses, Nat Fyfe and Jesse Hogan shared a laugh as they boarded one of three busses that would take us down Tonkin Highway to the airport.

Unlike a normal travel trip, the destination was not Virgin Australia’s Terminal 1. As we drove up Airport Drive, instead of continuing on to Terminal 1, we veered left onto Grogan Road.

After some checking of papers we were through a boom gate and straight onto the tarmac.

For what is normally one of the loudest places in Perth, it was peaceful on the tarmac. We didn’t hear one plane take off in the 15 minutes it took to board.

There’s a mixed atmosphere on the plane. Two separate games of UNO had broken out by mid-flight.

Near the back of the plane, Hayden Young and Roger Hayden occupy a row, separated by a laptop. They’re intensely watching vision of last Friday’s match simulation.

Sean Darcy pops up from the row behind. They’re watching slow-mo vision of a stoppage where Darcy finds Nat Fyfe perfectly with a hit out. Young gives him a round of applause.

While half are being social, half are taking a break and reading or listening to music. Sam Sturt lies prone across a row of seats holding an iPad watching Stranger Things.

Be part of the $1 Million Forever Mega Draw and help keep our club strong FOREVER!

Behind Sturt are two umpires who will join us on the Gold Coast.

Dean Margetts has a copy of The West Australian, which boasts “PERTH TO BE NEXT AFL HUB”.

Credit to The West - it was all twitter was talking about when we landed. But the expected duration of our stay on the Gold Coast differed anywhere from four to eight weeks.

If we had to be cooped up somewhere, it would be hard to find a better place than Royal Pines.

For starters, the gym might even be better than the one at the club.

What was once a rugby ground has now been stripped of the rugby goals and replaced with footy goals.

Two years ago, the AFL was retrofitting rugby grounds for AFLX, now it’s for an even stranger concept!

Obviously, we’re not the only occupants of the Royal Pines.

I’d love to build up the mystique of the rivalry with West Coast, but has all been very friendly. Within an hour of our arrival Justin Longmuir and Adam Simpson had bumped (not literally of course!) into each other and were chatting in the foyer and the same was happening with players.

It needs to be this way if we’re going to get through the next four-plus weeks. We’re not going to be able to avoid each other sharing the gym, lifts, downstairs café and just passing each other in the corridor.

After a day of travel, it was back to work on Wednesday. The players eased into it with a light session on our retrofitted footy ‘oval’ downstairs before ramping up with a big session at Metricon on Thursday.