Up, up and away

A few hours to go before the Brisbane-Heathrow flight. Over the last couple of weeks it's amused me occasionally to read bloggers (you know who you are) complaining about "long" flights within the continental USA. Well, let me tell you ... (Monty Python fans, feel free to imagine the "When I were a lad" sketch here).

There are three internationally recognized ways of measuring the length of a journey involving air travel(*). From shortest to longest these are: initial take off to final landing, door to door, time from waking up at start to going to sleep at destination. My trip "today" (which is actually relatively short by the Australasia-UK standards) comes in at: 25 hours, 29 hours (UK traffic willing), 48 hours (if I can manage to keep my eyes open until some sort of reasonable hour for going to bed).

So, don't come whining to me about your 6 hour flights. The "best" journey of this sort I ever had was a few years ago when I was traveling from Dunedin to Turku, Finland. Just before takeoff, I called my family who were about to start a day's skiing in Wanaka. From Copenhagen, with a 3 hour wait in the airport plus a short hop to Turku still to go I called them again as they were sitting down to dinner after skiing -- for the second time.

(*) I just made that up.