Day 1 – Sydney

Calling it day one is a bit of a cheat as today was only a travel day.

Our flight to Sydney was on a A330 which I found to be surprisingly roomy. In flight entertainment was via an iPad streaming to and movies. These muted during announcements but didn’t pause which seemed a design limitation.

The flight staff were pleasantly Australian, middle aged and not trying hard to be anything else, quite down to earth which is funny seeing as they couldn’t be further from.

The salmon and salad was a god send as the meal as it was loaded with spinach to settle my stomach.

I haven’t been to Sydney in a good many years, and I don’t think I have ever transited through from domestic to international. Given we had a 13 hour wait* between our arrival and the flight out to Chile I thought an airport hotel was in order. What I did not anticipate was that there would be a half hour wait for a train ($5.80 ticket for one stop) to take us from T2 to the international terminal. In retrospect a cab might have made more sense, or at least if we’d known the train timetables we would either have hurried, or taken our time so as not to miss the last train by 4 minutes and sitting at the station for 26 minutes.

Once at the international terminal the Rydges hotel was clearly visible and we checked straight in.

I think that a door on the toilet is a must in every hotel room. I remember once traveling with my friend Nikki and having a bathroom with a clear class door in our shared room – very odd.  This isn’t quite so bad, at least the glass is frosted even if it doesn’t go right to the floor, but I think toilet doors deserve to have a bit more solidity to them, especially when you’ve just stepped off a plane. It isn’t the ideal honeymoon bathroom arrangement in my view.

We won’t be seeing anything of Sydney as well make the 200m walk back to the international terminal at the dignified time of about 9am tomorrow.

* I really need to spend more time when booking flights as there are a number of missteps I have made with this trip. In this case a nice break before the next 16 hour flight may actually have worked out well but it wasn’t intentional.

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