Advertisement
In a first for us, we sourced house sitters from the Happy House Sitters website to look after the house and dogs during this trip. They coped OK with being put in kennels for three weeks last year, but we were reluctant to kennel Gidget and Finbar for seven weeks. Not being able to identify relatives or friends to take on the house/dog minding this year, we turned to the Internet. What a wonderful tool it is helping to match up people with properties available to be sat with people who are willing to house/dog sit!!
Kerry dropped us at the airport and, in return, will look after our car for the next few weeks and then meet us at the airport when we return. After a quick coffee with us, she waved us off at the doors to the international section of the airport. Quite a bit has changed since February last year as part of Tullamarine's ongoing refurbishments. We managed to proceed through Immigration fairly quickly but of course, after being x-rayed, I was singled out for the bomb/drug detection test of my carry on bag and the pat down of my person!! I have no idea what demographic it is that we fit into, but one of us is invariably selected for this screening every time we fly??!!
Then it was on to the duty free shopping! We bought some earbud-style noise cancelling headphones that proved to be a great investment, blocking out a significant amount of white noise during the flight. As has become something of a tradition, I also bought a new Swatch watch for a good price with an additional 10% discount off the already below retail price.
That left us with about two hours to kill in the Qantas Club Lounge. They had some really nice food on offer so we had a fairly substantial lunch before it was time to board our flight to Singapore aboard an A380. When we first planned this holiday we were very excited about trying to fly at least some of the sections on an A380 but then, after the engine problems last year, we were a bit dubious about it. In the end, the only leg that we booked on an A380 was our outbound Melbourne to Singapore leg.
When everything works as it should, it really is an amazing airplane to fly on. Despite it's humungous size, take-off was a breeze - it didn't seem to take nearly so much runway or so much 'grunt' to get it off the ground as a jumbo. The flight itself was as smooth as silk and almost entirely free of white noise thanks the quieter engines and the noise cancelling headphones. They even seem to be able to land the A380 using less runway than a jumbo. I guess it is down to the advances that have been made in aviation engineering in the last couple of decades?!
On this leg we both managed to catch up with The Next Three Days which we missed when it was on at the cinema. We both thought that it was much better than Leigh Paatsch had led us to believe from his review. What a surprise ... not! Apart from that we didn't watch much. I watched a few Big Bang Theory episodes - one of significance that I hadn't seen that explained why the elevator in the building does not work!! So glad I know that know. Bernie watched a ridiculous movie starring Nicolas Cage that was called Season of the Witch. We're not even sure if it was released in Australia???
From Singapore the A380 proceeded onto London so we had to change onto QF005 bound for Frankfurt aboard a jumbo that had departed from Sydney around the same time that we departed from Melbourne. Happily I can report that this leg of our journey was also very smooth and entirely uneventful. We even managed to arrive in Frankfurt slightly ahead of schedule!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.052s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 7; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0352s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Monica
non-member comment
Sounds Great!
I've always wanted to travel to those places. It sounds like overall it was an awesome trip. www.swisshotel.ca