Getting there is not half the fun

Our Great British Adventure

April 16, 2018

We had 3 flights to get to London: the first was from Emerald to Brisbane first thing in the morning. This was the flight I was most concerned about as it has a history of being cancelled and if we missed it then we missed everything following it. Fortunately it wasn't cancelled, although it did arrive in Emerald half an hour late. We still had 3 hours in Brisbane before our next flight (to Singapore) so it wasn't a big deal. I relaxed, foolishly thinking that it would all be smooth sailing from there.

I was disabused of this as a series of "delayed" messages started appearing for the Singapore flight. We had a 5 hour layover in Singapore so it wasn't a drama... at first. We were told there was a mechanical issue, but that they'd eventually fixed it enough to get it out of the hangar - not hugely reassuring, I must say. We did get lunch and snacks for free as both Anthony and I were given $20 food vouchers - presumably food is a good distraction?

Finally we boarded - only to have one of the engines misbehave after we rolled back from the gate. The mechanics needed to change a spark plug (?!) and we had to go back to the gate for that. Everyone was getting rather antsy by this stage. The flight was absolutely packed with people leaving the Commonwealth Games (we seemed to have a large chunk of Team Wales onboard) and most had connections to make in Singapore. We got off the ground eventually and the pilots did their best to make up time on hour 7.5 hour flight but we were still nearly 4 hours late when we arrived.

Still, that meant we had a shorter wait in Singapore before switching to QF1 which had left from Sydney. By this stage our bodies thought it was 3am or so and we were dead tired. This meant that we only bothered to note that we boarded on time, and largely ignored the hour sitting on the tarmac caused by a paperwork fault that caused us to lose our takeoff slot. The longest leg - nearly 14 hours - was starting.

I'd splurged on Premium Economy for this leg and it was definitely more spacious, but nothing helps me sleep on planes. Anthony managed a fair bit (good as he was driving once we arrived) but I only managed 3 hours and a couple of naps. It's amazingly tedious: though I caught up on movies and tv shows, the inability to move around much is very uncomfortable.

We arrived in Heathrow at 7.30am UK time, and shuffled along a huge queue for over an hour to get to Immigration. Despite that, our bags still hadn't turned up on the carousel. Sigh. Eventually they came through and we headed to the phone store to pick up the local SIM cards I'd pre-ordered: that really worked out well, with the data being particularly handy. We were almost free! There was only picking up the rental car to go.

Unfortunately, however, I'd stuffed up our arrival date when booking the car which I found quite upsetting (jet lag and no sleep were _not_ helping here). Being the predators they are, Europcar promptly declared that they had no small cars left (despite lots being visible in the lot) and strong-armed us into getting a larger vehicle at over double the cost. We gave in from exhaustion, but have vowed to never use them again anywhere.