Sunday 4th- Touch down

We have arrived safe and sound after an arduous 38 hours travelling. Once more we said "never again!" then remembered we have to get home the same way! At least we have 30 days to recover.

We had no problems all the way through, everything flowed like clockwork- Auckland-Sydney-Dubai-Heathrow. Flew on the Emirates A380, nice plane, everything new and fresh. The flight was very smooth, hardly felt like you were in the air, no bumps and jerks. Takeoff was effortless. The aisles were a little tight though, seating seemed a to have a little more room although I think it was an illusion as there was plenty of headspace. Never got to see upstairs except for the full width carpeted staircase with the bar(yes a real bar) located at the top. Us plebs could only watch from behind the gold & red woven "theatre" cord as we queued for the loo! From the outside the plane looks like a big fat cigar or a double decker bus two full sets of windows running the entire length. The huge engines(2 either side) looked like fat slugs sitting close to the ground. Every leg of the flight was full to capacity and talk about babies, there would have been 10-12 on every leg! Luckily the ones near me behaved.

Great entertainment system available on every seat of course. On demand movies, music and games. I managed to watch four movies, all great. So great I can't remember the names. You can also watch the on board cameras that are located on the tail facing forward, on the nose and two on the underbelly. Great to watch on approach, the underbelly one made me feel sick. I would have liked one in the top cabin, that would have been fun.

We arrived at the apartment at 3:30pm and went straight to bed- 45hrs bed to bed. I had about 5-6 broken hours sleep on the plane at various stages but still felt shattered. I think I prefer to fly AirNZ as there's only one stop off so there's less time spent sitting around in transit. It's now 11:30pm and I'm wide awake but I guess I better try to get some more sleep so I can adjust to local timing tomorrow. Trouble is we were in such a hurry to get to the apartment we didn't buy any food(thought we'd pop back out later) so I hope I don't get the muchies in the middle of the night. Our last decent meal was breakfast back when we left Dubai.