Australia: It’s (not) all about the journey

Landed back from Istanbul on Sunday, took off for Australia on Tuesday evening; it’s a pretty busy period for me. Erin even gets to come along this time!

This Australia trip was going to be our one proper holiday this year, the rest of 2014 had been deliberately quite dry as far as holidays were concerned. The last few weeks were obviously an exception for me, but that was just taking advantage of some time off in between changing jobs. Getting to grips with the new job will likely mean this will be the last proper trip until the second half of 2015 as well, best make the most of it!

I spent the gap in between the two trips mostly recovering from the previous exertions – well needed, my legs pretty much shut down when I stopped using them. I also decided to start my jet lag preparation early, staying awake (cooking, of course) until 6am Tuesday morning and then attempting (partial success) to sleep through to the afternoon to get myself a little bit closer to the +11 timezone we were traveling to.

Got to the airport Tuesday evening deliberately very early – about 4 hours before flight time. Then, after clearing security pretty quickly, we spent the next couple of hours in the fancy-pants executive lounge which our Amex account gave us access to. Free drinks and food, comfortable seats, charging points; this was definitely the right way to start the trip!

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Unfortunately we were back to cattle-class (economy) for the flight itself, will have to wait until next time for our plans for business class to come to fruition. We board, get “comfortable”, and we’re off to Sydney via a very short stop in Dubai.

Our itinerary for the holiday is mostly centred around Melbourne – a couple of batches of family time either side of a few days attending some friends’ wedding and afters. While we do have some free time mostly to ourselves in Melbourne the 2.5 days in Sydney is really the only “just for us” time we’ve set aside. It’s therefore going to be pretty important that jet lag doesn’t wipe out any more of that time than necessary!

I usually recover from jet lag pretty quickly anyway but I had a plan for how to optimise this time. I changed my clock to Australia time as soon as I boarded and from then on I’d attempt to a) sleep and b) eat at Sydney-appropriate times. We were leaving in the evening, so early morning the next day in Sydney; the meal we’d just eaten was breakfast, Dubai would be a late lunch, no sleeping until midway through the second flight.

There’s nothing particularly exciting about long distance flights, so here’s the summary of that 25 hours of my life that I’ll never get back:
– I watched some films:
— Guardians of the Galaxy was OK, nothing special
— The Thomas Crowne Affair (original version) was quite good, ended up with the “Windmills of your Mind” tune such in my head for quite a while afterwards (and now that I’ve remembered, it’s stuck again)
— What We Do In The Shadows. Vampire mockumentary. Was excellent, very funny.
– I played some Android games; The Wolf Among Us is quite good.
– We played quite a lot of two-player Carcassonne. It’s a long time since I’d done any hot-seat gaming, good times!
– did some reading
– the 2-hour Dubai stop was a welcome break, and got some decent food in the lounge there
– got a few hours sleep – not as much as I wanted, but at least at the right time

That interminable day later we landed in Sydney just after 6am. We got through border control surprisingly quickly – me interloping in the Australian citizens line due to being family – and were shortly on the ridiculously-overpriced ($18 for a 15-minute one-way fare, are you having a laugh?) train into the city. We’re here, and it’s more than two weeks before we have to go through that again!

There certainly won’t be a daily update this trip, will probably split it into logical sections. Next update will be the Sydney bits, many more pretty pictures!


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