Day 1 3 June Brisbane - Hong Kong - London

Our free limousine service arrived at 9.15PM and we left Brisbane on time at 00.50AM. They fed us dinner at about 2 AM and then breakfast about 4 hours later. We slept most of the way. We arrived in Hong Kong after 8½ hours, amid dark and rainy skies. We thought we would have lots of time to get to the departure gate for our connecting flight. A young fellow from the Gold Coast who had sat next to us, was lost, so we were able to take him with us. The only thing I had not counted on was that the maps of the airport were definitely not to scale! We were leaving from the same terminal that we arrived in, but it was so large that we had to catch a train - really! Our next haul by plane was a ‘short’ 13.5 hours, which seemed to be rather endless. Once we got to Heathrow we were pleasantly surprised that it did not take long to go through passport control and customs. We were even more pleasantly surprised that our luggage had actually arrived with us. What took the most time was walking to the bus station. The maps were not to scale here either. A taxi was very tempting at this point, but at $130-140, we opted for the bus instead, for $40 and a 25 minute walk from the coach station to our hotel in overcast but perfect 20 degree Celsius temperature. We arrived at our hotel at 6 PM. Still full of airline food we skipped tea and had a McDonalds thick shake instead. I tried to pay in change and apparently I had old 1 pound coins, which they won’t accept. The same thing happened with 5 and 10 pound notes in 2018. When we walked back to our hotel, we walked along Horsferry Road where the 1^st AIF HQ were located in London during WW1.  It’s an area that would have been well known to the diggers but it has since been demolished and replaced with Channel 4 studios.