Holiday: Day 0

All holidays begin with great optimism, ours was no different, however after what I would describe as a positive start in the morning (we went out to breakfast as a family) things turned quickly when we received the notification that our flight would be delayed, from 4pm to 8pm.. arghh

Anyhow, it meant that we could continue on our day and try and relax, some of us played Fortnite, some played on their iPads, little bit of last minute cleaning, dog vomited… wait a sec, the dog vomited?

Our furry friends are a funny bunch but I think we underestimate how much they can tell that things are happening and both our dogs definitely knew that something was going down, poor Harry and Chelsea (the dog is fine now by the way).

There’s been lots of commentary in the media about big queues and delays at the airports so we intended to leave slightly earlier than normal, although we are generally early arrives anyway, so we left around 2pm, aim to get there by 3pm, stuffing around, queues, yadda yadda and we hoped to be through and ready by 6pm… we were through by 4:30pm, basically no queues at check in or the border control people with the airport feeling surprisingly quiet. Even once we were inside a large amount of the shops are still not open whether that be good or retail, so we were left to sit and wait.. and wait.

*Mandatory masks between Sydney and Singapore*

But the waiting came to and end and it was time to board, with our masks on, for both check in and the flight. I’m somewhat indifferent about masks, I don’t mind wearing one so I was quite content with that decision, but so be it, on the second leg of our trip from Singapore to London they weren’t required so we got to breathe in the fresh stuff as much as we wanted.

Our plane was an A380, I enjoy flying on the biggest of the big, you actually lose a little perspective because they are so big you forget you are on a plane. Without boring you we had two great flights, which is pretty standard for Qantas, but one thing I did particularly enjoy was the food.

Airplane food doesn’t generally have a good reputation, but if they served it I demolished it which is kind of my thing, but for my son to demolish his too, it must have been good.

Everyone has their own strategy for catching planes, for us we decided to divide and conquer, myself having Sebastian for the trip and Luci taking Isabelle and we would both sit away from each other. This worked extremely well.

Something I don’t think worked well is sitting window side in the three person side of the plane, both times we had people who slept for the majority of the time which meant getting up was a nightmare, I will definitely amend this for the future.

Surprisingly time went by relatively quick, I didn’t sleep too much nor did I watch much TV, I had my homie sitting next to me so we played some iPad games which seemed to make time go by pretty quick. Overall flying was a success.

What was not a success was getting our baggage at Heathrow. Earlier I’d mentioned that our fear was that luggage would get lost, and when we first got to baggage claim there were just rows of baggage just in the terminal, I have no idea whether this is just left luggage or what but first impressions were that clearly there are many people who have travelled somewhere and are missing their bags, I was low on confidence.

What gave me confidence was the AirTags. Once we were in the terminal I did a quick check and amazingly it showed they were in the proximity of where the plane landed, they had made the trip.

The next part was waiting which I’m pretty certain we waited at the baggage claim for an hour before I finally noticed they they had moved closer to where we were standing, sure enough they came by on the baggage claim and we were off, time to find our way to the hotel and kickstart our holiday!!

Michael

Holiday: Day 1 - London

Holiday: Day -1