Schapelle Corby never imagined her "normal" life would be "ripped apart" when she boarded a flight to Bali more than 12 years ago and was thrust into notoriety almost overnight.
Her dramatic deportation out of the Indonesian island back "home" was likely just as inconceivable.
Just after 10pm local time on Saturday she posted a photo on Instagram with just one word - "boarded".
Corby was expected to board a Virgin flight out of Denpasar at around 10pm to Brisbane. But even on this, she may have had the last laugh with reports that she switched flights.
Twelve years after being sentenced to 20 years in prison, almost 10 years spent in jail, and more than three years on parole, the 39-year-old emerged from her Kuta home on Saturday afternoon to take her first steps back to Australia.
Wearing black sunglasses, a white shawl over her head and holding up a bag with the face of missing boy William Tyrrell, who disappeared from Kendall in NSW in 2014, Corby and her sister Mercedes scurried into the back of a corrections vehicle surrounded by media
As journalists jostled with police, their brother Michael filmed the circus atop of the villa's gate, sporting yet another mask - this time of an old man with long grey curly locks and beard.
After crawling through the scrum, the van joined a convoy of corrections vehicles, which shepherded her to their Denpasar office.
Here the sound of a single - "Baaaa" - could be heard as one photographer fell from quite a height, trying to get a shot of Corby
At her third and final stop, two vans filled with police with blue lights flashing turned up only to roll away with no Corby in tow, sending media scampering.
Soon after, section chief of Denpasar airport Hermansyah, confirmed Corby was already inside.
"She entered through an airport employee entrance," he told AAP.
Years after being caught with 4.2 kilograms of marijuana at Denpasar airport, Corby spoke of the "deep, all-consuming, heartbreaking longing to go home".
"I'd often imagine my future dream home, picturing myself lazing back on a cosy couch in my large lounge room, watching a pub-size flat-screen TV or cooking in my big kitchen," she said in the book My Story while in Kerobokan.
More than a decade later and free from parole conditions not to speak to media, Corby took to Instagram on Saturday and began posting images of the beginnings of this wish.
"Going to miss these two," she wrote of her puppies Luna and May.
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