The Plan

Another Birthday Party in Europe. This one was planned for Porto in Portugal, but there are no flights directly into Porto so Lisbon was chosen as the first stop, then onto Porto for almost a week, but where to next?

We chose Madrid then a revisit to Barcelona to hopefully meet up with a friend who lives there. From Barcelona Carol wanted to visit some places “Snow” wanted to see when he was alive Marseilles and Lyon, My choices to end the trip were to follow Brussels and my family in Assen in the Netherlands, later it was decided that we could spend a day in Delft, which was on Carol’s Wish list before a long flight home.

The plan was set and now how it was realised, what went right and what went wrong, what we would do again and what we won’t do again. READ ON.

The Flight

An afternoon flight from Sydney to London then changing to another flight at Heathrow to Lisbon simple enough.

Though this seems simple it has its draw backs, a two-hour stopover in Singapore for refuelling where we were all required to disembark, and again go through security to re embark then what do you do for two hours at an airport. The consolation for this part of the trip we had an interesting person sitting next to us with whom we could converse.

Heathrow was different here we had to change terminals which required a bus ride then a 6 hour wait for a 4 hour 45 minute BA flight to Lisbon, if 2 hours layover was not bad enough 6 hours is unbearably boring and made out total time from departure to arrival in Lisbon 33 hours.

Note: in future we need to break this journey with at least on stop over, possibly 2, we are no longer teenagers who can go that long without sleep.

The service we had on the flight from Sydney to London flying Qantas was good, and while we travelled in Economy the seats were much better than on the BA flight from London to Lisbon which were worse than seats, I have had on road coaches, these were narrow, hard and uncomfortable (I said to myself it was only a short flight).

Service on the BA flight left me cold we were only given a small bottle of water and snack pack of 100g, if we wanted anything else we had to pay extra just like a budget airline. We could see the service for the business class (their seats were not much better than our economy seats) this was a sham as it continued to almost to the time they were to get the plane ready to land, we even saw the steward hand a basket of bread rolls to a passenger to use his fingers to take a bread roll, this would never happen on any other airline I have flown. (Note: Avoid BA at all costs for future flights)....

 

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Welcome to Herman and Carolann’s Travels to Europe

Portugal Trip 2023