<< One More Flight

07/26/25 - Flying Home or At Least to Los Angeles

We flew home first class. There had been a run on flights to North America thanks to the Air Canada strike. Imagine the temerity of flight attendants who wanted to get paid for their work. Our original flight and a good number of others had been canceled. We had planned to fly business class, but Qantas was running low on seats and adjusting prices to match. It didn't cost much more to book first class. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

First class was very nice. They ask for the license plate info of your taxi so they can greet you and check your bags at the curb. There's a very nice first class club with good first class food. It's hard to capture this kind of thing without proper staging, but we took a few photos.

As for the flight. We all made it across the Pacific, even the folks who couldn't spring for premium economy. The plane was an Airbus 380, a monster of a plane that is no longer being manufactured. It was gigantic, so flying it was like crossing the Atlantic on Bruce McCall's HMS Tyrannic with its indoor 18 hole golf course. There wasn't actually a golf course on board, but there was an upstairs lounge that photographed horribly, excellent service and a big lie flat seat with an amazingly complex control mechanism.

We wicked slept well, at least until we neared Los Angeles and they served breakfast. We went through the same customs and immigration as everyone else. We just had a head start. We could go on about how Los Angeles International Airport is a madhouse, but others have done it before us and probably better.

We considered taking a taxi to our airport hotel or perhaps using an app, but that would have meant taking a shuttle bus to the pick up area. We just waited for our hotel's shuttle bus to come and were just minutes to our hotel, gratis.






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