The flight that would never end.....

The last time I posted, I was sitting in Dubai during a scheduled layover. I was supposed to fly out at around 10am for the 14 hour flight to Sydney. All looked well, and I was getting more and more excited. However, plans, as they seem to be doing during this trip, went awry.

I get to the gate, and they load the plane. I am sitting in an aisle seat, which I am not too happy about. Also, the plane is packed! Who would have thought that over 500 people would be on the same plane for a daily flight to Sydney? Anyway, I am sitting on the plane, and we aren't moving. We get the announcement that there is a technical difficulty that they are looking at, should be about 20 minutes. This happened a couple of times before they decided to disembark the plane after about 2 hours.

We get off the plane and wait for another three hours to reboard. Now as I mentioned before, the terminal in Dubai is pretty well stocked. However, I wasn't buying because I didn't want to be carrying more stuff than I had. Staying simple for the travel as much as I can. So we reboard and are moving. We take off about six hours later than our original flight. I am thinking that this is OK, because now we will get in around noon, and should have no issues on checking into whatever hotel we find.

The plane we were on was an Airbus380, which is a huge plane. The seats had the screens like I mentioned on the previous flight so you could watch movies, TV shows, play games, listen to music, and follow the flight. I slept a little, I read a little, I wound up watching a couple of movies, and basically killed time. Then, as we are approaching the west coast of Australia, I can feel my ears pop.

Yeah, we are landing in Perth, which is on the west coast. Now this is not scheduled. We landed because an elderly passenger on the plane was not feeling well, and needed medical attention. So we land, and they get her off of the plane. But there is another problem. The crew is at their limit for time to work, because of the delay and such. So they legally can not pilot the plane and take off to complete the trip. So we all have to disembark in Perth and wait for a new crew to fly from Sydney.

Another six hour layover in Perth now. Much smaller than Dubai, obviously as it isn't a major airport, but they had some shops and it could have been worse. But, we had to sit for six hours and kill even more time. When they finally got there, and we reboarded, it was about 4pm before we took off. Now, we are getting even later on our arrival, and we don't have a hotel. This was because we didn't know when we would get there, and figured since we were landing so early, we would have plenty of time to figure that out.

We land in Sydney, finally, and it is after 10pm local time. We have to get our bags, and go through customs. It seems as if our bags were some of the last pulled off the plane, so it was after 11pm by the time we got through all of customs. Now, we need to find a place to stay. Many of the places at the 'Accommodations Booking Center' did not have 24 hour front desks. And since it was sort of an 'automated' type of stand, there wasn't a person to help us out.

As it got to midnight, they moved us to this small area in the airport so they could close sections off for cleaning and such. I had to break down and spend some cash to get internet access and book a room someplace for us. I couldn't book it for that night, because it was after midnight and had to book on the 16th, or the next day. I got us some rooms then, and we decided to find a cab and just go and see if we can check in early. Then, our luck started to change.

There wasn't a lot of traffic around the airport, but we were lucky enough to be able to hail a taxi that happened to be driving by. I think we stole it from someone else, but at that time, I didn't care too much. We drove to the hotel in North Sydney, and I had to wake up the guy for the front desk. I felt bad for doing that, but he did help us out and got us one room for us to cram into for the night.

The whole travel time took about 30 hours. I have had a couple of bad experiences with
flights, and this one wasn't the worst. However, it just seemed to take forever, and ever, and ever. At least we got here, and now we can move forward with our trip, which is now one day shorter. I am typing this after our first day here, so will get the next post about that shortly, but needless to say, things are looking better now that we are finally in the land down under.

Until next time.....