10 July 2019

The longest day ever… 

After a restless night’s sleep, filled with dreams and expectations of sleeping through alarms and no show taxis, we were up at 2.50am to gather our many bags and get ready for the bus (which, despite our fears, turned up before time). We piled the kids out of bed, into the minibus and we were off to the airport, slightly disbelieving that we were finally leaving. 

It has to be said that everything went like clockwork. We arrived on time at the airport, we checked in our 165.5kg of luggage – 5 bags, bike, snowboard, 5 carry on backpacks and 3 children without Emirates blinking an eye and went through customs without a hitch. 

We tried and failed to convince Emirates that kids didn’t count as adults for the purposes of lounge entry, but got around this by Jessie and Anthony smuggling various goodies out for broader family consumption (including juice, croissants, salmon roles and sausages). These were gratefully consumed in the lounge reception. Subtle.

We boarded without incident and found our seats at the very front of the plane (unfortunately in economy!), celebrated a free seat next to Sienna and got settled for the 14 hour flight. 

Not a lot of positive things can be said about a 14 hour day flight with young kids, but this was about as good as it gets. Decent food, comfortable enough and Sena and Jessie managed to get some sleep. Ellie even managed to do a mini gymnastics performance in the common area. She was impressed, we’re unsure about the other passengers! 

So 10 days – I mean 14 hours – later, we arrived at Dubai. Being at the very front of the plane, we were basically first off and didn’t break stride going through customs and arrived into baggage reclaim just in time to see our bags first off the carousel… all of 15 mins after getting off the plane. Pretty impressive. Even the bike and snowboard were there 10 mins later. 

Jessie was amazed at the scale and fit out of the airport. Ellie and Sienna were totally unaware and unmoved. A sign of things to come we suspect. 

Miraculously, the baggage storage guy kind of just appeared and suddenly we were 6 bags down and on our way into town on the metro, high fiving each other about how smoothly everything had happened. 

We made our way to the metro and onwards to the Crown Plaza, our base for the next few days. On arrival at our stop, we left the safety of air-conditioning for the outside for the first time. You would think we had arrived on Mars without a spacesuit. The kids melted. Sena started crying and immediately refused to walk. It was 40 degrees. We walked the 250m to the hotel. You would think that we’d flayed the kids from the whinging… but despite their protestations we actually did arrive unscathed. 

We checked in to the Crowne and the guy at reception gave us the cursory ‘is there anything else we can do?’. Liz pounced. Free breakfast. Free breakfast, Free breakfast. Negotiations followed and we landed on the ‘executive package’ which was to define our Dubai culinary experience for the next 3 days. Free breakfast. Afternoon tea. Happy Hour including nibbles. What they actually meant was: free breakfast (3-4 courses) + smuggle out morning tea and early lunch; afternoon tea; dinner and drinks. All for $80 per day for the family. Result. 

We dumped our bags and partook of the afternoon tea, vowing to return for happy hour after a swim…. Which we did, before drugging the kids (can we say that?) and passing out.