OTN APAC Tour 2016 : Waiting to Begin

stopwatch-25763_640In a couple of hours I’ll be taking a taxi to the airport to start my journey to Wellington, New Zealand. The actual departure time is 21:20. The flight to Dubai takes about 7 hours usually, so if I’m true to form and can’t sleep sitting upright in economy, I’m going to be pretty miserable by the time I get to Dubai. I’ve then got 3 hours in Dubai airport, where I don’t think I qualify for lounge access, despite my upgrade for the next flight.

From Dubai it’s a 16 hour flight to Auckland, which I was really dreading until I got an option to upgrade to business class. If I can lie down I can sleep anywhere. On several occasions I’ve slept on tiled floors at airports with no problem. If I’m sitting upright, or with that slight tilt you get with an economy seat, I just don’t sleep. The best I get is some head nodding. It cost me a lot of money to upgrade this flight, but 16 hours is a long time to be in an economy seat if you can’t sleep. Having a business class seat should allow me to sleep, so even if I get on the plane in a bad mood, I should be able to sort myself out during this flight. The current plan is to try to sleep half and work half of the time. Let’s see how that works out. 🙂

When I get to Auckland it is a 2 hour wait before getting on a 1 hour flight to Wellington. I’m hoping by this time I will have had a lot of sleep and will feel OK for the conferences in Wellington and Auckland over the next couple of days.

Total flight time will be approximately 24+ hours, with total elapsed time from leaving home to arriving at the hotel being about 32+ hours. I feel a little sick just thinking about it…

I normally write blog posts about travelling as I go, but depending on how this one works out and how tired I am, I might drop offline for a couple of days, so I thought I would put something out preemptively to start the ball rolling. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…