Wednesday June 12th
We’ve all been lucky enough to fly QANTAS Business Class using Frequent Flier points, which necessitated my leaving four days earlier and returning 4 days later than Ian and his brother Robbie. It suited me as whilst Ian and Robbie are doing a boat/bike ride island hopping in the Adriatic Seal along the Croatian Coast, I am spend time with my brother John in Newquay Cornwall. Then we all meet up again between 2nd and 9th July in London, where we have scored tickets to the Wimbledon Tennis for four days.
My Business Class QANTAS flight to Tokyo leaves Brisbane an hour late at 11.30am June 12th. I’m given over-sized PJ’s - they’ll fit Ian - but I don’t intend sleeping on a day flight. The flight is relaxing enough but whilst the seat turns into a lovely lie-flat bed, there is no inbetween reclining position for the feet. I watch a few movies, The Dry 2 (reall good sequel to The Dry with Eric Bana), The Rooster (a bit of a weird Australian Movie which I didn’t finish) , and The Great Escaper (a really good movie about the war veteran Bernie Jordan, who escapes from a Nursing home in 2014 to attend the 70th Anniversay celebrations of D day in France (June 6th 1944). Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson are brilliant as the aging couple Bernie and Rene Jordan. Sadly Glenda Jackson died a few months after the movie was made. Lunch is a Buffalo cheese salad followed by Filet steak (a bit well done) with an Australian shiraz. The 9 hr flight seemed like a long time.
I arrive in Nerita Tokyo about 7pm and after a few hours in the Sakura Lounge where I avoided the traditional Japanese food, my Finnair flight to Helsinki leaves at 11.05pm from Gate 63. and I am pleasantly surprised at the extra long lie-flat bed set diagonally to maximise the length. Dinner is served at 1am local Tokyo time, but I’m still full after a big lunch and have nothing except a cup of tea and biscuit before stretching out and sleeping for 6 hours. The only issue is there are two sets of seat belts, one for when you’re sitting up and the other as a lap-sash over the hips when lying down, which made the bed feel a bit like a straight jacket and not easy to turn over. I’m awake to watch Hellen Mirren and Ian McKeller in the movie The Good Liar, which I had seen before, but it was even better the second time.
Thursday June 13th
Breakfast is a a welcome tray of eggs, sausage, fruit, yoghurt, buns, coffee and apple juice. I'm starving by now and eat the lot. The flight was really smooth with no turbulence, so it’s tempting to give the straight jacket seat belt a miss on the same flight on the way home in July. Just before landing, we’re handed a certificate for having flown over the North Pole, which was probably why the flight was so smooth with no monsoonal winds usually encountered over the normal Asian and middle eastern routes. We arrive in Helsinki at 6am and I find my way to Gate 47 for the flight to Manchester which leaves at 8am. It’s a small Embraer 190 with less than 200 people on board. Business class seats are exactly the same as Economy except there’s a flapping curtain separating the two classes, and we were served a second breakfast of sausage, mushroom, tomatoes with fruit and yoghurt. I struggle to eat any after a big breakfast on the previous Helsinki flight. Three hours and 20 games of Solitaire later, we arrive in Manchester where I breeze through security with everything e-ticketed now. Customs is non existent except for a few sniffer dogs checking out the Africans who bring in maggot infested meats. It’s cold and drizzly outside, so I find a seat to swap my Australian phone sim for a ”Three” UK sim which we had bought in Australia and it works fine after an hour of tweeking the settings.
I walk a few hundred metres from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3, where I’ll be leaving for Newquay in the morning to check out my baggage weights as Logan Air ony allows 15kg in the hold and 6kg as cabin baggage for a total of 21kg. I have a large sturdy Samsonite duffel bag with a smallerlight weight duffel bag tucked inside (for the trip home from Helsinki after passing on the large bag to Ian), with a Deuter back pack tucked inside that. The lot weighs 17kg. As well, I have a smaller back pack weighing 7kg for. total of 24kg. I’ll need to do a bit of reshuffling from one bag to the other and wear a few more layers of clothes - which will be easy to do because it’s cold and raining in Manchester.
I send a message to Sofita, my host at my Air BnB for the night, to ask if it’s OK to check in before the usual 3pm and after getting the OK, I book a Bolt taxi - kind of like a European version of Uber only cheaper. It’s only a 7 minute trip to 38 Cowland St, Wythenshawe, about 1k as the crow flies from the airport and I find my way into the house via a lock box and up the stairs to a small but very clean bedroom with a large window overlooking an overgrown garden and chimneys from housing flats. I had planned to do a short walk to the local SPAR but it’s mizzling rain and 12°C outside so I have a hot shower and curl up on the bed to blog and phone home.
Dinner is a hot soup I made from a Continental packet I had brought from home and after repacking ready for a quick getaway in the morning, I'm in bed and asleep at 9pm.