The sun gets up early in London at this time of year, less than a week out from the summer solstice. I guess I should have shut the blind but I didn’t so I fired up the laptop at 5:00am and spent 90 minutes doing some work on the last few day’s photos. That was enough to put me back to sleep.
We were to be out of the room by 11:00am which is pretty generous so there was no rush to get up. Nevertheless, just after 10:30am we were walking out the door for the Euston Station Underground. The plan was to catch the Tube to Tottenham Court Road then change to the new Elizabeth Line out to Heathrow. The Elizabeth line opened only two years ago, running East to West across London out as far as Reading in the West with a service to each of the four Heathrow Terminals. There’s a premium to be paid for taking the Elizabeth Line to Heathrow, about AUD$20.00 by my calculations. Not too bad, I suppose. You can still get to Heathrow using the Piccadilly line for about half that cost but it will take about twice as long to get there.
Our ride on the new Elizabeth line delivered us right into the heart to Terminal 4 right where the Departure gates are located. After we found the postbox to post our last postcard to Mum (it’s located outside Gate D) we checked-in. It’s all customer-driven these days – hardly a human in sight, just one or two people to help travellers who have buggered-up the process – like the Smiths. Our bags disappeared down the chute and our fingers were crossed that we’d see them again in Melbourne in 24hrs time. No dramas in customs, aside from my full water bottle, and in we went to wait until our 3:15pm departure.
To our delight QR004 was only about half full, if that, so we spread out in our centre row where we prefer to travel these days. You’ve only gotta climb over your travelling companion to get in or out of the seat. The new plane was very comfortable so the 6hr45m journey went pretty quickly – I spent most of my time catching up on this blog and Kerry spent most of the time doing her sewing, which she found easy to do in this big new plane with plenty of elbow room.
The three hours spent at Hamad International Airport in Doha went pretty quickly while we waited for QR889 to Melbourne. It really is a huge and very flash airport. Our plane was older and quite full but comfortable enough, nevertheless. It left at 3:05am so the enthusiasm to do things other than eat and sleep was minimal. I did try to get the blog up to date but then the cabin lights went out so I stopped. 13 hours after we lifted off the Doha tarmac we touched down on Melbourne just after 11:00pm – not feeling too bad, actually. The automated passport reading machine didn’t like Kerry’s so we marched off to get a human to do it. There was not a single person in the queue when we arrived there so through we went very quickly. Our two little July suitcases appeared to our delight and relief, we walked through customs (carrying Jan Sonogan’s undeclared drugs in my case), out to the Skybus which arrived immediately, and then into Southern Cross. The frosty weather made the walk to the Great Southern Hotel in Spencer St pretty rapid at 00:30am on Tuesday morning.
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