Arriving in Australia

Arriving in Australia

So Sunday came and Charlotte and I were whisked up to Heathrow by our parents ready to board our flight at 5:00pm. I arrived first, followed by Charlotte roughly 45 minutes later. In those 45 minutes, I made an error and decided to try and check in by myself. 

Apparently I managed to change the seats we'd booked while doing so without realising it.

Charlotte arrived, swore never to let me check in by myself again, got the seating fixed and then we went through security!

At this point I was a bit spontaneous. For 2 days prior to takeoff, I'd been doing a study in which I was paid £250 to let scientists cut into my legs. I had £250 in cash and I was sat around waiting in duty-free. 

So yeah. That happened.

While waiting around with a couple of hours to kill, Charlotte and I went to find somewhere to charge it up. We found a charging spot and managed to engage in conversation with a hilarious South African traveller/photographer (Stephen) who had pretty much every bit of GoPro accessory kit you could buy on his person at the time and one of the best accents I've ever heard. We chatted to him for a while about surf, sharks, travelling,  sharks, working on boats, sharks and various other aquatic based topics before we had to board.

Our plane was with Cathy Pacific. No, I had never heard of them before either. Turns out they are amazing. The flights were half-full, leaving the premium economy seats (the ones with the extra legroom over the wings) free as no-one was willing to pay extra for them. I hobbled into the plane and politely asked that really I could do with stretching my wounded legs during the flight. The flight attendant immedietly offered us the extra legroom seats. This happened on both our first flight (12 hours) and out second (8 hours). A whole row of 4 seats with tonnes of space, to ourselves. It. Was. Awesome.

I'm 6'2 with size 13/14 feet and room left to spare

Now the last time we flew to Oz, it was with Emirates. They fed us once over the space of 23 hours and we had to ask for water which was provided in tiny cups. Cathy Pacific, on the other hand, fed us almost continuously and were constantly up and down with the free drinks trolleys. Free snacks, drinks and massive meals meant that we were sat down for hours and hours, mostly eating. Definitely my best flight experience. 

Now we landed into Brisbane at 11.50pm-ish and thought we could walk to our booked hotel (Ibis budget). This is where the first of a few problems were encountered. We immedietly got lost and ended up walking around sprinklers before ending up in the police station. Not wanting to accidentally wander blindly into the nearby Brisbane River (shark infested), we turned back and booked a taxi. Turns out that was a great idea - the hotel was over an hours walk away IF you knew the way.  When we got to the hotel, the key we'd been provided didn't work. We had to wake up the night porter (who really probably should have been awake, being a night porter) to get in. Upon getting to our room, we found out just how madly jet lagged we were when we found ourselves wide-awake at 5am.

Cut to 10:45am Tuesday morning. We're bussed back to the airport (previous walking plans having now been totally abandoned) and then shuttled up the Sunshine Highway to Mooloolaba! We arrived in the blazing sun and a video of the remainder of the journey will soon be published!