European Contiki Adventure 2nd June - 4th July 2022

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Day 1: 2^nd June, 2022



Sydney – Darwin:




The Beginning of an adventure of a life time

Day 1 of my 1-month adventure in Europe began at 11:30am when I arrived at Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport, 4 hours be my 3:45pm flight to Darwin on a Qantas 787 Dreamliner. The reason why I arrived at the airport so early because I was at advised by Qantas that there would be extensive delays due to staff shortages. However, when I got to the flight check-in area, I noticed that me and a few other people were the only ones in the terminal, so checking in, dropping my bags off, going through customs and a security was only a 10 min process. After I made my way past security, I thought to myself, “now what” as I had over 4 hours to kill. So, to pass the time, I walked through the Duty Free Section of the terminal and was looking at the overpriced alcoholic drinks, with a ‘Remy Martin Louis XIII Jeroboam’ costing over $37K and I ain’t even going to pretend that I know what it is, but it does seem ridiculously expensive.





Following that, I made my way to the food section and with all the nice restaurants that the food court had to offer, my own impulses went straight to Maccas (‘McDonald’s’, I am indeed Australian) where I coped a double cheeseburger meal, and sat next right in front of a giant window overlooking all the different planes, taking off and landing. This is where I got truly excited for the journey ahead of me as only in a few hours’ time, I will be in the air flying halfway across the other side of the world. After my subaverage double cheeseburger, I headed over to a nearby bar where I ordered a pint of Heineken beer and while the beer was nice and refreshing, and did the trick by making me feel a little bit tipsy before my flight, however, the beer costed me a whopping $19 which put me in a bad mood and I vouch that I will never order another item from that bar in the foreseeable future, until I forget about it that it.





Few hours past and I’m at the gate waiting for the boarding to begin, feeling a slight queasiness in my stomach as I am beginning to realise that I am about to embark on a 23-hour journey to England. When I heard the announcement that boarding has begun, I waited until the que died down to head towards the gate to get my ticket scanned and began boarding the plane. I placed my bags over the seats and sat next to the window wondering whether the two seats next to me will fill up, luckily there was only one person sitting in the aisle seat so we had the middle seat between us empty. As we took off, I said to myself, “Cya Sydney” and put my BEATS Studio headsets on and started watching the entire Star Wars Saga trilogy that I downloaded on Disney+ and began by watching Episode II, (sorry to Episode I fans out there, I couldn’t face anymore torture considering the 23 hour journey a head of me). 3 hours later, we began our decent into Darwin Airport with an hour waiting time between the next flight, thus ticking off the first leg of my adventure in Europe.







TLDR Summary:



TLDR (Too long; didn’t read), I know this blog turned out to be longer than expected (as this is my first time writing wrong, I will improve don’t worry), but overall, I found my experience at the airport pleasant enough with a short waiting time at the customs and security, while I did get a bit bored wondering around the terminal for 3 hours. Apart from the number of crying babies on board the plane, the overall flight with Qantas was expectational with fine service and managed to entertain myself by watching Star Wars. Stick around for the next part of the blog as I will be blogging day to day of my European adventure.

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