The Flights

'Crags' seen from our room at Edinburgh University
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Its a long way to Edinburgh from Melbourne.

Leaving Melbourne was sad but exciting for us both.  Aware of what was ahead for us, we boarded the plane.  Window seat - Yeay!  But the view out of Melbourne was cloudy - excitement anticipating the sunny country we were heading for.

Never have you seen two people more board...monsoon

Determined to keep ourselves awake on the flight to Singapore, we watched a movie, attempted to read books, but found ourselves playing the Singapore Airline Nintendo Super Mario game.  Didn't take long, or many loss of lives for us to be board of that.  Never have you seen two people more board.  Short of playing rock/paper/scissors - we somehow managed to occupy ourselves for the 8 hour duration.

We had pre-requested vegetarian meals so it was great to eat specially prepared food (much better than normal airplane food) and always be served before all other passengers.  We were a bit disappointed to discover that they didn't provide vegetarians with cheese for dry biscuits, or even milk for our tea (we were given soy!)

Once finally in Singapore, we had a 2 hour wait to board the same plane to take us to London.  Both of us were too tired to appreciate the beautiful gardens built into the centre of the airport.  They had beautiful orchids and rainforest settings.  We will take photos on the way home.  We were pleased to hear our flight called.

The next flight (the long one - if the one before wasn't bad enough) we didn't have a window seat.  In fact, we were in the middle two seats of the middle section of the plane.  One person of either side.  Not exactly well selected.  But the advantage on this flight was that we could sleep.  Woo hoo.  Before the plane even left the ground we were asleep.  Woke up briefly to eat another Vegetarian meal before crashing for a record 6 hour 'snooze'! There was more broken sleep after that but the countdown was on for the landing in London.

We had to get from the London terminal we landed in to the Domestic terminal for our connecting flight to Edinburgh.  By this stage - tired, grumpy and no doubt pretty smelly.  I think we were up to 24 hours on the go at this point.  Found a cafe and had my first coffee in that whole time!

Flight to Edinburgh was brief, and it was great to land.  We somehow stumbled our way to our hire car - a new Toyota Yaris - and with me driving (despite the fact that I was in no state to do so) we fought through busy Edinburgh traffic to the Edinburgh University where we were staying.

It was on that drive that it started raining!  The traffic was dreadful and then the rain became hail (in Summer??!) and the roads started to flood, and we were driving through what we later found out was a monsoon!  :-)  Pretty funny now, but not at the time.

Finally, checking into our hotel at 2 pm, only 29 hours after leaving home.

xo Christie