Day One and Two, Sunday 2 April 2017

At last the day I have waited so long for has arrived. I booked and planned this trip over a year ago and yesterday the countdown app on my phone finally said ONE more sleep. See below, top right corner app FancyDays.

Yesterday day didn’t drag too much as I had quite a lot to do. My most important job was to pick up a Lego set I’d been longing for ever since I first knew it existed. Buying it the day before I go on a big trip isn’t really the smartest thing to do, because all I want to do now is build it, but I still have far too much to do before I go away, however at least now I have something very exciting (the Disney Castle) to look forward to when I get back.

So now I’m lapping it up, rubbing shoulders with all the rich people in the Qantas Business Class lounge.  Qantas kindly invited me to try it out. How could I refuse?  Boarding the plane in one hour – so excited, but all this free wine is helping to numb the excitement and get me very chilled out ready for the 30 plus hours of flying ahead of me.  Oh and Qantas just rang me to check I was aware of the hour long delay with my next flight, Melbourne to London.   So here’s my fab view of the lounge, it’s very nice and extremely quiet.

I’ve practically got the place to myself 🙂

Well here I am in the transit area of the Melbourne airport. My flight is delayed by two hours so I set off in search of a coffee and when I finally found one, embarrassingly none of my cards would work and the exchange rate for pounds to Australian cash was extortion so that was a buzzkill. I thought I’d die of thirst till I realised my phone was trying to tell me I needed to change the card controls in the ASB app so I could use them internationally. Success!

The Qantas flight from Auckland was packed and very very hot. But the service was fab and the food was great and I did manage to watch a whole movie – La La Land; not sure what all the fuss is about really and why did it win Oscars??? After the movie I did have a wee nap and luckily the nice lady sitting next to me saved my chocolate for me – they hand out Whittakers chocolates instead of lollies prior to landing. Nice!

Because of the big delay Qantas have just given everyone a $15 voucher to buy some refreshments while we wait for the gate to open. I wonder what caused the delay.

Here’s the big delayed beauty.

The flight from Melbourne to Dubai was no fun at all.  By the time we finally got to board the plane it was nearly 1:00 Australia time which was actually 3:00 am my time (NZ body clock), so I was really tired and expected to fall asleep on the plane straight away but that didn’t happen.  The flight was packed and it was dark nearly the whole way and it was really long (13 hours I think), plenty of time to watch a movie and some TV shows.

Luckily I had two unhappy ladies sitting next to me who didn’t speak much English and they were mad at the big delay coz they would be missing their connecting flights out of Dubai so we didn’t talk much and they both slept the whole time – which was a tad awkward when it came time for me to wake them both up so I could go to the loo (twice).  Anyway flying in and out of Dubai was quite interesting as there was snow on some mountains at times and nothing but sand at others.

    
My short stop in Dubai for just under two hours was a fuzzy blur, spent mainly looking for a toilet with loo paper, every cubicle I visited had run out!  There were some very stunning shops in the transit area but I had no idea what the time was and when the flight was taking off, because the delayed flight meant the indicator boards were all wrong etc.  It was at this point I discovered a serious downside to an Apple Watch – you can’t manually adjust the time – it needs the phone to be connected to it to share the time.  But I had no idea what data would cost in Dubai so I never took my phone off Flight Mode.  Guess that gives me an excuse to buy a watch before I go home in three weeks time.

  
When we flew out of Dubai I could see the Burj Khalifa in the distance through the haze, which was kinda cool.

  
The flight to London from Dubai was great – only 7.5 hours – I watched the movie LION and loved it, thank goodness my new neighbours a recently married couple from the UK were asleep for most of my movie viewing coz it was a beautiful movie and I cried.

Border Control at Heathrow was very very long, 1,000s of people and long queues, Customs however was non existent and my suitcase survived the journey and was waiting for me when I went to collect it and then my friends were there to greet me and drive me home.

After a big catch up and relax we went for a walk to the local shops for a look round the village – Egham, and buy supplies from the supermarket.