Thirty Six Hours in Transit

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1.00am:

So here I am sitting at Heathrow airport, I’m roughly five hours into a thirty six hour journey from Edinburgh back to Melbourne for a surprise visit. I have eight hours left of an eleven and a half hour stopover in London and I’ve now challenged myself to staying up until my flight here leaves at 9.15am, a challenge I will no doubt fail. A little hindsight would have been awesome when I booked these tickets about seven odd months ago. I went for the cheapest tickets I could get my hands on, $1300Au from London to Melbourne and returning back to Istanbul. The only real stupid thing I did was booking from London instead of Edinburgh, considering I wanted to base myself in Edinburgh or probably Scotland anyway. I’m not entirely sure why I did it but it’s obviously pointless to worry about that now.

So the best way down to London was by flight. I toyed with the idea of taking a train down straight to Heathrow in the early hours of the morning, but it cost about double of the flight. The most obvious downside of an overnight stay in the airport is that everything is closed, not ideal to keep me up all night. And on top of that the past week has been a little crazy and very sleep deprived. It included a trip down to Liverpool and Manchester, to catch up with Simon and to watch the Man United – Arsenal game, and also a few nights out with Jen. The trip to Liverpool included a bus trip at 5.10am, and the night before I was out with Jen and didn’t get to sleep until around 2am. Staying with Simon meant staying up until crazy times playing Fifa11, I think the night before I left Liverpool we were up until around 6am. I think in the week passed by the time I get to Melbourne I will have spent at least two of those days in transit. I’ve averaged about four to five hours of sleep per night for the past week. I have no way to describe how wrecked I’m feeling at the moment better than that, basically because my brain feels fucked. So needless to say it’s going to be hard to make it through tonight.

By 9.30pm I arrived in London and was hoping in vain that I’d be able to check in and dump my luggage, go through security and just chill out, possibly even sleep without worrying about my stuff. Though I don’t know what I’m worried about anyway, most people here are either working right now or asleep like I should be. Part of my theory for staying up all night is that I’m hoping to sleep through most of my flight, but the main thing is to try and change my sleeping habits to Melbourne’s time zone without too much delay. This plan unfortunately counters my belief of milking airlines of as much booze as I can, though I’m not sure how well drunkenness is thought of in my next stop of Abu Dhabi is. Still, if there’s an open bar it should be exploited, so I’m somewhat disappointing myself by not doing the right thing.

1.37am:

I’m starting to feel pretty tired already. Well at least there’s around four and a half hours until I can check in. If I last that long I could take some solace in that. The plan after that is to get myself a free upgrade into business class. Best chance is to get in early and ask nicely and then I’d at least get a bed on the plane. It’s not going to work but it’s worth a shot. Then if that fails I’ll try and sweet talk myself into a super cheap upgrade instead. I’m ignorably confident one of those two will work, basically as I stated before because my brain is fucked.

4.25am:

Somehow I’m still awake but I’ve lost all hope of staying awake before boarding the plane. I’ve had an expensive yet delicious sandwich from Café Nero the only place that’s open all night then moved to a bench that’s close enough to the check in counter so I can see when I can move through to the departure lounge. In the time between this point and last I had written another blog, and started watching a movie that my head can no longer process. More people are slowly coming into the airport. It’s not quite bustling yet, which I’m a little surprised at.

4.44am:

I just saw a guy setting up the check in section for Etihad and asked him when it opens up. 5.20am. So I have around thirty five minutes before I can check in and get a bit of respite. Though if I’m lucky enough there’ll be stuff on the other side to keep me going. I’ve got about an hour and a half before the battery dies on this thing so I might start using it a bit sparingly. I did want to write more blogs I doubt they’d make much sense considering the state I’m in.

5.45am:

Free Upgrade Challenge: Failed.

Worth a shot but it didn’t happen. I also tried to get moved to a seat with more leg room, also failed. It turns out the flight is only half booked so they’ve blocked out most the seats from being taken. So I made it through to the other side but I can’t go somewhere to take a nap. I was intending of going to the gate to get a sneaky kip, because after all I don’t really trust myself to wake up in time to get on the plane. But the gate number hasn’t been allocated and probably won’t be until it’s about to open. Interestingly as well, I was wandering through duty free checking out the whiskey range when one of the customer service ladies came up and talked to me. She seems to think that I won’t be able to buy any liquids over 100ml duty free and bring it over to Australia and that I can only buy alcohol once in Melbourne. Well I sure as shit hope that’s not true and if it is, I can get through customs without any fuss because I spent about $250 on whiskey in my luggage with one of those being from a single barrel release. So I’m gonna be pretty pissed if customs take it off me. One thing’s for sure, if they do take it I’m going to make sure that they pour it all out in front of me. No way in hell I’m going to let them have that whiskey at my expense. On a positive note I’ve gone through the rough patch of fatigue and feel somewhat less sleepy. I’m sure if I tried I’d probably go straight to sleep, but I’ve made it this far so I hope I can battle on.

6.43am:

I’m pretty sure I’ve found which gate my flight’s leaving from. I saw an Etihad plane touch down and wandered around the airport to find where it docked to let people off. So now I could rest my head or battle my way through. There’s only about an hour and fifty minutes left. As it stands I’m nine hours in. It seems pointless to give up now, especially that I’ve not gotten my free upgrade. I’m currently staring out the window watching the planes slowly come in, and just noticed the baggage handlers giving each other security pat downs. You would have hoped that the pat downs would have been done before they actually got down to the tarmac. Man I wish I could fast forward time right now. My mp3 player has died so I’ve got no music to help pass the time. A plane has just ported in front of me. Hopefully this will provide some much needed entertainment.

6.54am:

Plane stuff is pretty boring. It’s almost impossible for me to keep my eyes open right now. More pat downs, there’s some weird yellow machine hooked up underneath the plane where the cockpit is, I can only assume it’s a fuel pump. A big load of what looks like packages wrapped in black plastic is being loaded into a truck. Looks like they kinda failed at putting it in. Looks like the truck has some sort of conveyer belt thing in it. I could see the large package through the glass panels slowly moving forward. This was after a macho man had to shove the rest of it into the truck.

5.08pm:

I’ve just landed in Abu Dhabi and made my way to the gate where my next flight leaves. It was absolutely mental trying to get through the flight transfer section. There were a few flights that had just touched down and the security point is this small cramped area. The airport itself is pretty cool though, plenty of shops and food, though beer is pretty pricey but I’m going to have to get used to the extortionate prices in Australia again. I can’t be arsed taking out any money to buy anything and my flight leaves in about an hour and a half so there’s not long to wait. My flight over ended up being pretty good. Because the flight was pretty empty I moved seats and took up a whole middle row to myself so I get to stretch out over four seats and take a decent nap, and I also managed to get a sneaky beer in too. My next flight is going to be about thirteen and a half hours which is going to be pretty shit. Though the movie selection in flight is pretty good, and includes some recently released and current movies at the cinema. Anyway, I intend to take full advantage of the open bar this flight so it should go fast I hope.

*Sometime after landing in Melbourne

My flight from Abu Dhabi ended up leaving an hour late for some reason. This also meant I landed an hour late back home. This also meant that my surprise visit home got sabotaged. I’d sneakily set up for Chris, Dave and little Josh to be over at mum and dads so I could turn up to the door and surprise the shit out of everyone. I would have been through the door at roughly eight at night, but because of the delay I got in at about quarter past nine which meant Josh was past his bed time and Chris left for home already.
I drank quite a few whiskeys on the flight, but not really enough to get me drunk. I had passed out from fatigue at some point and I’m not sure how long I was out for. Though I have to say as well that the service from Etihad wasn’t exactly great. At one point I’d decided I was due for a drink and went to call for an attendant and for some unknown reason he turned off the call and just walked off. Other attendants didn’t seem to be too friendly except for one that was incredibly nice. I had reasoned that because there were pretty much no taxes on Etihad that their comparative prices to other airlines would make them better. But maybe because it was such a long flight it did affect the hosties attitudes. Who knows. Though I guess I’m not used to really dealing with hosties considering I’m usually on budget flights that include no extras. I did get a pack that included ear plugs, eye shades, a toothbrush and paste, and a pair of socks, all of which were very welcomed.

Oh and as suspected I did get checked at the airport and the alcohol came through with no issues. I knew I would get checked, even before that lady mentioned that I couldn’t buy alcohol. I contemplated getting a few more bottles through duty free, almost coming to the conclusion that I was just being paranoid and luckily I decided not to take the risk. I was almost sent through the line that would get the sniffer dog treatment and free pass when at the last second I got sent through to the x-ray machine. Being the first one through, my bag was the one chosen for the random security inspection. As the customs officer was checking through my bag she say the whiskey’s, and asked “are they just bottles of alcohol?”, and at this point I thought I was fucked. After sheepishly replying yes, she replied “That’s fine” and let me through. Phew. I later got told that you can’t bring anything over 100ml in hand into Australia, so I guess having it in stored luggage is fine.

And a special thanks to Bernie for coming and picking me up, cheers mate.

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