Well I can safely say we survived. I can’t say we enjoyed 27 hours of travel, the 2am wake up call, ridiculously bad airline food or the 3 ½ hours of delays in Dubai but we did it and we are here.
The first flight was fairly smooth, we had amazing seats, entertainment was great and the flights were all on time and fairly painless however when we hit Dubai the trouble started. It seems instead of being able to shop while you wait for your flight the aim of all airlines these days is to herd you (as sheep) into these holding areas which you are supposed to sit for a few minutes before you board. Now that is ok until you get delays … and boy did we get delays, we had 3 ½ hours of PA announcements saying that the flight would be ready in 10 minutes … as you can imagine this gets old fairly quickly … what is entertaining though is watching how people react to this. You have the loud Australian cracking sarcastic jokes, you have the little old lady going on about how this never used to happen when she used to fly and you have the kids who just decide its not fair and scream for the entire 3 hours. We were given complimentary drinks and cake while we waited and as you can imagine an entire A380 flight of people lining up for food is going to be crazy, but the fact that some people decide they are going to take six bottles of water instead of one and backpackers seem to think if they get enough of that cake, they wont need to buy food for a few days just adds to the hilarious nature of the situation.
Suffice to say we were very happy to be getting on the plane … except the plane was hot …. When I say hot please don’t misunderstand and think that I am being a winger … when I say hot I mean, midday in Dubai and it seems the aircon was left off for the entire 3 hours of delays so when we got on I swear I felt like I was walking into an oven…. But again, out travel agent did us well, we had amazing seats at the partition and the world … while hot seemed good. Until the seats behind were filled and the first words out of dads mouth was … “let me say in advance, I’m so sorry” They had a little boy sitting on their lap, an overheated, over tired three year old who was just a little bit over it all.
And this is where my head and my heart started arguing. The right thing to do would be to swap seats with the family so the little boy can go to sleep on the floor at their feet. It was the practical thing to do but remember at this point I’m hot, tired and grumpy and I really was not willing to give up my little bit of comfort… however during take off where said boy screaming solidly for 20 minutes hubby and I looked at each other and there wasn’t really a decision to make. We swapped, they were grateful, boy went to sleep and we spend the next 7 hours shifting uncomfortably in seats way to small to allow for any movement other than swapping weight from one bum cheek to the other.
So people, let us hope that this good deed added a few karma brownie points to the tally and lets get the holiday started!
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