Day: 3

Too busy doing stuff to have written about it, so we have a lot of ground to cover! We'll do it over a couple of posts to avoid terminally boring people.

Firstly, the Thing We'd All Been Dreading, the 13 hour flight to London from Singapore.. (cue scary music). First pleasant surprise was that it's only 12 and a half. Bonus! We had a new A380 on this leg that we'd been looking forward to flying as we thought it would be much better than a regular old 747. Eh, not so much.

Second pleasant surprise was that Tara slept for probably 10 of the 12.5 hours, making the whole trip a lot less stressful than it could have been. We also had no repeat of the Luca incident of Day 1, so most people around Tara got to sleep too. Not us, of course!

During her wakeful periods, Tara discovered the joy of infinite mirror reflections in the baby change toilets, where she could reach out to and chat at an extremely large number of herselves.

Despite leaving more than an hour late from Singapore, we landed slightly ahead of schedule at Heathrow, only to discover that we had no nose-wheel steering, and so couldn't taxi to the terminal. This was lucky, as the thing we'd most hoped to do at the end of a 13 hour flight (alright, 12 and a half) was sit on the runway for 45 minutes waiting to be towed to the terminal by a glorified tractor. Come on, I'm allowed some sarcasm..

Travel tip: to avoid customs delays at Heathrow, be sure to take a baby with you.

Not always practical, I'll grant, but after sending Mal a message saying we'd been sitting on the tarmac for ages and were at the back of the queue for customs due to waiting for our stroller to appear at the airbridge, another pleasant surprise: we rock up at the back of the queue and they opened up a little gate for us - "through here with the baby" - which took us straight past 600 waiting people. Ha! Didn't even have to wait that long for our luggage, nor stuff around with any further security checks, public floggings, etc. Despite all the bad things I'd heard about Heathrow lately, it was not a bad experience at all, and a lot less unpleasant than Melbourne airport as an arrival.

Having someone waiting (and waiting..) to pick us up and whisk us celebrity-like to our English country abode was an awesome feeling at the end of all the travel. Huge thanks to Malcolm for dragging himself to the airport at an uncivilised hour to fetch us.


So, no trees. Although an honourable mention must go to the genius designer who placed two of the A380's bright cabin downlights directly above the heads of sleeping babies in the bassinets! Nice work.. Fortunately we had a Gerri-rigged solution.