After a pleasant stay in the business
lounge at Singapore
Airport, we went to board
our plane and at the usual luggage check prior to boarding Lyn got pinged for
having a pair of scissors in her carry on bag. Not good. They confiscated them.
She got them through Newcastle, Dubai, without them picking them up on x-ray.
Suitably admonished we boarded our Qantas
Boeing 747-400 for the 7hr+ flight to Brisbane.
The Qantas flight was part of the code sharing arrangement between Emirates and
Qantas however we both felt that the Qantas food and service wasn’t a patch on
the Emirates service although the staff were very nice.
We didn’t have a good start to the flight
as sitting at the front of our cabin in seats 1A and 1B there was a couple with
a very small baby which decided to throw up all over the seats prior to take
off. This caused quite a kerfuffle with calls for medical assistance over the PA
system for help from any Doctor who happened to be on board and staff having to
clean up the mess. The staff ended up replacing half of the seat.
This whole business delayed our take off by
about 30 minutes.
Our seats were 3A and 3B right in the nose
of the plane and there was heaps of room and no-one walking past in the aisles
however the 747 was nowhere near as quiet as the new Airbus A380’s. This of
course is to be expected since the 747 model has been in service for 20 odd
years.
The seats were the new design with the
ability to convert them into lay flat beds. We both thought that they were
rather hard though but apart from that they made quite good beds.
The dinner selections we were offered was
rather limited in comparison to Emirates so we had to make do with soup and bread
roll for a main course.
After watching a movie we settled down to
try and sleep and on this flight Lyn was more relaxed as she was drowsy from
the affects of taking an anti-nausea pill. We both felt that neither of us
slept as there were regular bumpy bits which tended to make sure one stays
awake, however we felt the rest did us good.
The cabin lights went on at about 4am for
breakfast as they like to get it well out of the way before the plane lands. In
this case that was about 5.30am.
After landing in Brisbane
we had to collect our luggage and go through customs but as we were flying Qantas
Business, we got fast tracked and were on our way to the domestic terminal by
6am to await our 8.35am flight to Canberra.
The Boeing 737-800 to Canberra was packed and the Captain
attributed this to the fact that it was school holidays and Floriade was on.
A very smooth cloudless flight with great
views of the Australian landscape ended what has been an epic voyage of
discovery over the past 134 days and after 123 posts, ended the marathon effort of producing this blog.
Thank you all for sharing it with us.
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