Europe 2017: Day #1 Leaving Town

Thursday, 3 August 2017

I had to think about the logic of including a full entry for a day in which only about 7 hours of it were actively involved with the trip. And then I thought that, in order to be comprehensive, I should include it.

Our flight out of Melbourne was scheduled for 9:25pm, which was both a good and a bad thing.

The good was that, if all went well, we'd get onto the plane, settle in, be fed with a few drinks, and then have the lights off at around midnight body clock time for the long haul (13.5 hours) to Dubai.  The flight would be fleeing sunrise the whole way and would aim to hit our first stop sometime around 5am local time.  In other words it would stay dark the whole way and sleep would therefore be easier to achieve.  That was the theory anyway.

The bad thing about the departure time was that we would have to negotiate the road to the airport in peak hour, in Melbourne traffic.  And it started to rain. And we realised when we got into the car that we needed to stop for petrol. Luckily I had attempted to get everyone out the door by 5pm, which turned into about 5:10 before we actually locked the front door, and then almost 6:30pm by the time we had purchased the petrol, and were dropped off by Cath and Will outside the international terminal at Tullamarine.

The lines at check-in were huge by the time we got there; which is where the Qantas Club membership came into its own.  Although we were only traveling economy we were able to access the Business Class check-in lines, so it only took us some 10 minutes in the queue before we were dropping our bags onto the weigh-in conveyor belt. 

And a problem arose; there had been a mess up with our seat bookings.  The flight from Melbourne to Dubai was okay and we were sitting together, but the second leg from Dubai to Stockholm had us two rows and a couple of seats apart.  Although the flight was pretty much full we ended up being shifted to sit in the same row and a seat and an aisle apart.  Not the best but bearable. If this was the worst thing to happen to us on the trip then I'd be happy with such a minor inconvenience.

As is always expected the plane was a few minutes late taking off, but this was a new Emirates Dreamliner, a monster of a double-decker.  It's big, fairly comfortable and everything works. It seemed that all would go well with the flight.