We boarded our flight from Heathrow at about 9:10pm, it’s roughly a 6.5 hour flight to Abu Dhabi. I settled into my seat and looked at my onboard screen. It was about 00:30am, in Abu Dhabi and 35C.
Deb pointed out the Steak Sandwich in the “Gourmet Quick Dining” area of our menu, it comes highly recommended by our fabulous Travel Agent Jenni. So that is a must once we are in the air.
The steak sandwich was good considering we are 10km in the air!
I got some pretty good “sunset “ pics from my seat 
and then later in the flight I woke from a few hours sleep to see the moon out of the very top of one of my windows. As Deb pointed out earlier in our flight, I have 3 windows, she has none! What’s with that, I did offer to swap seats but she declined. I also saw a couple of planes going the other way (well, their navigation lights).
We landed in Abu Dhabi at 7:30am 
and had to go through security to get to the departures area and the lounge. I swapped out Deb’s phone SIM, then we had about a 2.5hr wait to board our next flight to Sydney. The Lounge wasn’t as busy as we were expecting, we had read horror stories about it with multiple flights arriving early mornings.
Our flight was on hold due to tail winds, they didn’t want to get to Sydney before the curfew is lifted. We boarded at around 10:10am, after going through another bag check at the gate, where they took all water and checked amount of fluids everyone was taking on board, first time in transit, that happened this holiday.
We pushed out from the terminal at 11 :10am and we are away on our 13+hr flight. And as it seems to happen, we have an woman with a “spicy” cough across the aisle from Deb. 😩
It was a long flight, at about 35,000 ft or 10.6km up, I guess we got about 4hrs sleep on the 2nd flight and a few on the 1st. (6hrs over a 55 hr period!!)
We landed in Sydney at 6:15am 
and were through customs and immigration by 6:55am.
We went to the Virgin transfer desk and were told our flight was cancelled (staff called in sick) and we were now on a 2:15pm flight, a 7 hour wait! We considered cancelling our Virgin flight and trying to get a Qantas flight, but my mind just wasn’t up to it, and neither was Deb’s really, but neither of us were keen about the 6 hour lounge wait. And the Virgin Lounge isn’t a patch on Qantas.
We then got a transfer bus over to the domestic terminals and waited for our now very much later 2:15pm flight to Adelaide.
And then it was all about The wait. We had a shower in the lounge then grabbed some food and drinks. Deb had a lay down for a while but no sleep was to be had.
We boarded our flight home at around 1:45pm, it was 100% full, no spare seats. We pushed out at 2:20pm and had a flight time of about 1hr 40. It was a good flight and we landed at 4pm in Adelaide. Much to our pleasure Carly and Ella had collected Louis and picked us up. Deb messaged C when we had our luggage and we were picked up and home in no time.
Big news of the day was Ella passing her driving test today and is now on her P-plates.
Carly had also done some shopping for us, so we had all the basics to get us going. It was nice sitting in our place chatting with them.
They left around 6pm, we finished unpacking and then had a nice healthy chicken soup (that Deb had made just before we left in May). We spent time with Louis
, making sure he was ok and settled. An early night for us.
What a great holiday, and the seeds of the next one have already been planted, but that is another brewing adventure. Stay tuned.
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