Day 1 and 2: That’s a big plane!

Apparently, it is that time of year again, the time in which we are leaving for a far away destination to go see and experience the way of living somewhere else. This time, it is Australia, and we’ll be there for a nice long time.

We are leaving one Kingsday, and luckily the traffic going to Amsterdam is not as bad as we anticipated. This meant we arrived at Schiphol feeling very relaxed and feeling confident about an issue with the seating in our plane. We don’t know where it went wrong, but somehow our tickets were not marked as travelling together, and we got seats in Two different compartments of the plane altogether. Luckily, we were able to resolve this with the friendly lady at the check-in counter. She got us two adjacent seats right next to an exit. This meant we had loads of space all around us!

The flight with Emirates took place in the biggest plane of them all: the Airbus A380-800. This thing is huge! Up until now, the biggest plane had a 3-3-3 or a 2-4-2 configuration, but here we have 3-4-3 for a total of 10 people per row, and the row numbers go to 88! Naturally, loading and unloading this beast takes time, so boarding starts around an our before flying. The 6,5 hour flight to Dubai was quite uneventful, but the 90 minutes layover was a bit short. We barely made it in time to the other terminal where our second and longest flight would commence. By the time we boarded, it was already Tuesday (local time)

The flight to Melbourne is by Qantas, and took 13,5 hours. Also, this was an Airbus A380-800, but our seats were less spacious as we only had as regular row. We did however not have a third passenger on our row of 3 seats and were able to get at least some sleep on this flight. Waking up after this was quite odd though, as the free left the lights off for the vast majority of the flight only to flick the switch mere hours before landing. And as we would land around 9PM, waking up to the evening is not the best way to get rid of your jetlag quickly. As we did not sleep long, our rhythms were not messed up that badly.

All of our bags made the trip safely, and were available to be picked up at conveyor 6 in Melbourne. The transfer to the hotel went via a thing called Skybus, a dedicated airport shuttle to and from the centre of the city. They even dropped us off at the front door of the hotel. Tired, and feeling well, we tucked in for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll start exploring the city on foot!