Merry Christmas! Today we are London bound. After months of careful and joyful organising, booking, planning and making sure the pets would be well cared for, we finally arrived at Day 1 of our adventure.
As usual the "getting out of the house with everyone and everything" is the hard part:
Fridges, bins and cat litter emptied
Cats and rabbits fed, watered and hugged
Timed sprinkler system for rabbits and electric fan with timers for cats
Windows locked
Passports, copies of bookings, loyalty cards, staff ID etc
Medicines, toiletries and a change of clothes in hand luggage
Books, laptops, camera, phones and a million chargers
Coats, gloves, scarves, beanies, thermals
Oh and gratitude with a smile.
So in the car with luggage that just fits and off we drive. Only now can I look ahead to the journey and holiday. We have booked "proper tickets" on Virgin Australia VA83 to Hong Kong and then VA 5341 to London Heathrow. It means we are guaranteed seats and we will get to London as planned and won't miss booked events. Certainly less stressful and relaxing than Staff Travel.
The only hiccup we can see are the Hong Kong protests that have rolled along for months. At one point the protesters were inside the terminal, disrupting operations to bring international attention to their cause. Hopefully all will go smoothly now that only passengers can enter the building. As we are not travelling as Qantas staff, Virgin will need to accommodate us and rebook out flight if there was a problem.
Checking in felt good as we knew we would get a seat- pinching myself. A few weeks ago Ben and I upgraded our seats to Hong Kong. We get exit row seating and a few extra things. We go through security, immigration etc etc and endure all the palava that makes travel onerous- laptops out, phones out, shoes off, LAGS bags out, passports ready but even then one of us gets something wrong. Off to the boarding gate and oh "no deviating through duty free Maddie!!"
We wait for boarding time but the flight ends up being an hour late, not that we mind as it means less time waiting in Hong Kong. At last our flight is called and we hop on buses to take us to the aircraft.
Never having flown Virgin before we were really happy with the service, friendly crew and product. The other passengers were mostly of Asian descent and everyone was relaxed. Perhaps it was because of Christmas, maybe just the route. We had turkey for Christmas lunch and I had a chance to watch Bohemian Rhapsody which has given me a new appreciation of Queen!
Apart from that it was an easy disembarkation and smooth transit formalities before settling in to our big wait for the next flight.
SYD/HKG VA 83
Seats
27 A & C Maddie & Harry
28 A & C Mum & Dad
Resting in HKG
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