Up, up and away

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I’m not sure about this flying out at 9.15pm. It makes for a long, long day of anticipation! Since Bernie had decided to work a half day I ‘worked’ too at Fitzroy Gardens as per my usual Thursday morning shift. After a quick lunch with Loren I headed off home to freshen up and change into travel clothes in time to do the handover with our housesitters at 4.00pm.

Kerry arrived about 4.30pm and with the handover with Fabian and Sarah complete we hugged Finbar and set off to the airport. We had planned to arrive about 6.00pm to check in for our flight, but we had a pretty good run on the Tullamarine Freeway and arrived at the airport just on 5.30pm. Even so we were not first in the queue that was already lining up at the Emirates desk.

With the bags checked in we made our way to the Qantas Club Lounge to fill in some more time before we would finally be on our way. Everything was running on time so we made our way to the gate at 8.40pm to board the Emirates A380 that would be flying us to Dubai. Once again, despite having a seating preference recorded in his Qantas Club membership of centre section, aisle plus one, we were allocated a window seat and a middle seat on the side. Crappy seating was a recurrent theme when we flew with OneWorld partners in South America last year and seems set to continue on this trip. Oh well, what can you do, but suck it up??!

We had a bit of a bobbly flight to Dubai with the seatbelt sign being switched on a few times throughout the night. The flight crew pretty much got us fed and then turned down the cabin lights expecting everyone to go to sleep. I did doze/sleep/doze for quite a while and woke up absolutely parched. I waited for a while to see if the cabin crew would come through offering water as they usually do on Qantas but, eventually, I gave up and pressed my call button to ask for a glass of water. I don’t think I have ever been so thirsty on a long haul flight.

In Dubai we got ourselves checked into the Emirates Lounge without any trouble. It’s always a relief to get in because we have been rejected so many times because our ticket hasn’t been coded correctly to admit us!! Once in we helped ourselves to the complimentary VOSS mineral water - from Norway - and drank our fill to try and get hydrated for the next leg of our journey.

The toilets in the Emirates Lounge were ... interesting. At first we thought that it was just the seats that were heated although why this is considered necessary in country as warm as the UAE was a mystery to us. Later when we were talking about it we agreed that it wasn’t just warm ... it was steamy, as if the water in the bowl was heated too?? The experience was rather like having a steam facial for our bums!!



Steps: 15,879 (We’d pretty much done our usual amount of exercise before we left home!)

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Comments

[Cathy]

Heated toilets ...
Yes that toilet water is heated - and VERY freaky! I remember Daniel and Bridget both telling us it was heated when we passed through in 2007 - we didn't believe them until we felt for ourselves! Maybe that's normal water temperature and they cool it everywhere else???