EN-ROUTE SYDNEY
WHAT an experience this has been. We started our journey yesterday with a 7 hour flight from Manchester to Abu Dhabi on an Etihad Boeing Jet. God planes are different on long haul trips!! The furthest I’ve ever been on a plane is to Tenerife which is only about 4 hours so this has been an experience and a half. One good thing about being in a w
heelchair (maybe the ONLY good thing) is the priority boarding at the airport and not getting lost because they push you the whole way haha!
The airline made us walk (well in my case, crawl) through business class to get to our seats which was TORTURE. My God is that luxury. Our bit was really nice - your own TV with all the latest films (I watched Kingsman Secret Service and fell asleep in Cinderella and Interstellar. Oops) and games with an xbox-type remote, USB sockets and a place to charge your phone! And free food and drinks the whole flight so you definitely get what you pay for…but the best bit was the wi-fly. Wi-fly! How amazing - you even get signal up in the air it’s madness - planes just amaze me and absolutely-scare-the-shit-out-of-me all at the same time. The only downfall was the space, it was absolutely tiny and soon uncomfortable. Reclines but not only a few inches back and just not enough room between you because the rows of seats are so narrow! I’m dreading the flight back because my head, my eyes and my ears will be in so much pain after the surgery and I’m supposed to lie at a certain angle too, so we’re going to phone the airlines and see what they can do. The problem is that even the business class seats don’t recline far so I have no idea what I will do but we can just cross that bridge when we come to it.
At Abu Dhabi we were 3 hours ahead of the UK and when you step off that plane o h m y g o d it is unreal how hot it is, we thought it was the plane blowing hot wind but it was just the air! By the time we were taken out onto the bus our faces were dripping. One thing to take into consideration if you fly to Abu Dhabi is the people who work there. I’m not sure if they are told they have to treat people a certain way or if they are just really angry over there?? I literally only met ONE nice member of staff and even he got a telling off from the other guy for being so nice! They were very standoff-ish with us the whole time and it was really quite uncomfortable. Oh and by the way - it’s SO expensive!
After a 2 hour delay, at 10:50 we boarded for Sydney on an airbus this time which was a LOT bigger and quite a bit nicer! At this point of our journey we were so tired but luckily we had the most amazing, lovely air hostess called Alex - who was from London - and she made us so comfortable. She let us have the row in front of us so that I could go and lie down because I need as much rest as I can get so that I’m well enough for my operation. I fell asleep about 1am Abu Dhabi time and right now we’re at 4:43pm at present location - we’ve just flown over Ayers Rock in Australia - so I have no idea if we’re in Sydney time zone yet or what because Australia is soooo huge I had no idea. Oh wait just had a flashing sign its 5:14pm in Sydney and we should be arriving at 7:04pm. I’m so confused with all these time zones because I’ve just woken up at 4pm but I went to sleep at 1am and I only slept 4 hours? So I’ve swapped from AM to PM… Totally confused.
The Kardashians have kept me entertained as usual and I’m bloody eager to arrive in Sydney now - I’m starving and airplane food is not nice…