Day 24 - Endless night - or was it day?

There is little you can say about a flight between London Heathrow and Sydney. There are some who say that travel improves the mind. I say they are fools - they have probably travelled nowhere in any conveyance other than an armchair. I spent some years in the early part of the century as a globetrotter and with the frequent flyer points I was lucky to be upgraded to First Class on most occasions. Yes, it's really comfortable and you can sleep lying down. But you are no less knackered and jet-lagged at the end of the flight than you are when you have flown at the back of the bus. Though the food is better!!

Dinner on EK412 - looks like all those other airline meals you have ever had - tastes like them too!! You see the prawns at the top? The G didn't eat hers, When I asked why she said she never ate shellfish on planes. This worried me - here is a woman who has a lifetime of experience in catering and food preparation and she won't eat shellfish on a plane. Too late - I had eaten mine, fortunately I have lived to tell the tale!!

We were in Row 82!! Now you may say "hang on, isn't that sitting on the tailplane?" And, yes, it very nearly is but the last row is in fact 87. I have been in row 1 when I was doing the First Class thing!!

Various flight paraphernalia from the back of the bus. Fortunately I have Gold  frequent flyer status (due to the Emirates-Qantas tie-up) so we get in the lounge and we get the Fast Track thing through Immigration and Customs

I would say that Emirates is certainly my airline of choice. We would not now think of flying internationally with anyone else unless there were no choice. And the check-in chick at Heathrow was an absolute gem - just lovely and very helpful (the order of these qualities is important).

Emirates (www.emirates.com) are really good. Fly them if you can

We were flying Rex from Sydney to Moruya. Moruya (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moruya,_New_South_Wales) is the nearest town to us of any significance. The transfer was a pain and then we discovered that Rex (because it is a regional airline flying small planes) has a 15kg luggage limit (though it's 20kg if you're coming from an international flight (where the limit would have been 30kg)). We were hit for $38.50 excess baggage - a first for me; I have never paid excess baggage before. 

Then the check-in chick said that because the flight was full and the bags were "overweight" that they would be checked as standby. They might be off-loaded from the flight if there was a weight problem. If so they would come on the next available flight. It is small comfort to think that there are three flights a day on a weekday. The mathematician (or at least logician) reasoned that in theory these bags could never arrive if all the flights had a weight problem. As it happened they did arrive and our friend Robbo was there to greet us and take us home.

The terminal building at Moruya Inter-galactic Airport: The G third from left and Robbo on the right

A view of the aircraft that brought us and the terminal building

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