The journey begins

I think I understand now why passport photos are deliberately made to look so monumentally awful.  It's so that after you've been sitting on a plane for 18 hours and get to the Immigration counter at your destination, you look as pale and miserable as your picture.  Perfect match!

We were two extremely weary travellers when we finally reached our London hotel room almost exactly 24 hours after leaving home.  

The very welcome sight at the end of the journey!

Somehow we accomplished the almost superhuman task of staying awake for almost all of that time.  The first 10 hour flight to Dubai was pretty unremarkable - just a standard procession of movies on demand, food on plastic trays and queues for the toilet.  After 2 hours on the ground in Dubai it was onto an A380 behemoth for the 7 hour flight to London.

We were less fortunate with our fellows on this leg of the journey or maybe fatigue just wore our patience particularly thin.  It did seem like the makeshift creche that established itself in the next aisle was particularly boisterous and certainly the three lads sitting immediately behind did their best to earn the lad title.  After starting with a beer at breakfast, one of the three then joined with his mates on the Dubai leg to find out just how many scotch and cokes they could sweet talk out of the cabin crew (answer = at least half a dozen each).  By the time we reached London they were decidedly merry ... and very entertaining!

View over Heathrow airport

We were very grateful we didn't have far to go before collapsing in a heap into a comfortable bed.  There's something extraordinarily restorative about sleep, a hot shower and a nice meal and the cares of tomorrow can wait until, well, tomorrow.