Trip report - to Doha, London, Calgary, San Francisco

I wasn’t planning to fly BNE-DOH-LHR, but Qantas cancelled my flight a few days previously. I wasn’t expecting to be put on a Qatar flight, but it’s nice enough. The flight times are rather better - I get an extra twelve hours at home, the DOH layover is only a few hours, and I don’t have six hours to kill in London before my hotel will officially accept me, so all is good.

BNE-DOH

My neighbours are an Arabic couple - a heavily-accented lady sitting next to me, and a man with the most impressive beer belly that I’ve seen in a while.

They both sit, and excitedly test out all the things - bashing the screen to make it work, ripping open the amenities.

The lady spends most of the flight complaining that the flight attendants don’t understand English very well. This is confusing, since… they do. But it’s a recurring theme.

The man starts laughing. He’s just tried the seat-back table to discover that it only barely clears his belly when it’s folded - and there’s no chance of unfolding it. He manages to deal with the food when it comes, though it’s a delicate balancing act (and some of that balancing is using his belly as a makeshift table).

I discover that this Qatar flight has free wifi - not just free wifi but blisteringly fast: at 200Mb/s, it’s as fast as most hotels. Brilliant. (It turns out it’s Starlink, which is kind of good but also kind of a shame).

DOH-LHR

My plan to work on this flight using that amazing free wifi was thwarted by, um, a very expensive wifi package that is limited to about 300MB of data, and is therefore entirely unusable.

An English couple are next to me. As we are on final approach - within thirty seconds to landing - she decides that she wants to get up. Her husband loudly protests, but she starts fidgeting and wants to move. This, I know, means a risk of an aborted landing - and no, I do not want that. I put my hand on her shoulder, look her in the eyes, and say in my most assertive voice: “You are not getting up. You will stay there.” She looks at me in horror - but thankfully, ten seconds later we hit the runway. She leaves her seat as we leave the runway - but at least we managed to land without incident.

I then sit in the bedlam of Costa Coffee in terminal three, working for an hour, before making my way to the hotel.

KGX - BDI and back

From Kings Cross to Bradford, on a Grand Central train. It’s an odd affair, where the buffet car seems to close within half an hour of leaving London. My neighbour is wider than I am, so I’m a little squished.

The train announcements haven’t recorded “LOW MOOR”, so when we get close to Low Moor, the announcement says “Our next stop is.” followed by “This is.” when we stop there.

On the way back, a really very drunk man sits down the other side of the carriage, angrily complaining about the conductor who has told him to move from where he was. He’s fizzing with anger, and says he’s going to pull the cord in a minute. But he thankfully forgets about that, and instead, proceeds to have an argument with Siri on his phone. He’s very desperate to play Christy Moore’s Ride On, and slurringly shouts at his phone, for the whole carriage to hear.

“Excuse me? Could you play a tune for me please. Could you play Christy Moore? Thank you.”
“I couldn’t find Christy Moore in your Apple Music library.”
“Hello? Right. How do I play -”
“Do you want to play golf?”
“I fucking don’t want to play fucking golf, I’m on a train. Come on. It goes like (sings) ‘You ride the finest horse’. That one. Can you play that?”
(Silence)
“Is there a possibility that you’d play Christy Moore? Hello? Can I have an Irish tune?”
Siri starts talking about being stranded on a desert island.
“I’m not on a fucking desert island I’m on a train to London! Now. Could you please listen to me? Will you please play me a record for me, please, thank you.”
(Silence)
“Hello? Excuse me lady. Is it possible that you’d play a, um, a , er…”
“I didn’t get that.”
“Listen. I’m not joking. Listen to me. I pay for this thing. I want to see, no, I want to listen to, er, put that geezer on for me.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I pay for this. This is bang out of order. Can you play me Coldplay?”
“Coldplay is not in your library.”
“You’re making me very very angry. (pause) (nice voice again) Excuse me lady? Could you play Christy Moore?”
“I didn’t get that.”
“Thank you lady. Let’s try again. Could you please play a record for me on this telephone? Please? I want The Travellers. Get that one and get that on there! Thank you.”
“Something went wrong.”
“Right. Right, listen to me. I want to play some music. Timmy the trumpet or the other fella.”
(Silence as he stares at his phone)
“Pamela? Who’s Pamela? You’re bang out of order.”

This goes on for forty minutes. A very long forty minutes.

He starts shouting at his phone. At one point he - astonishingly - asks to speak to her supervisor. (“The gaffa in charge”). I stare at my phone with my headphones in, hoping he doesn’t try to start a conversation with me.

It’s funny, but also not. It’s the unpredictability of this drunk man that worries me - lolling into the aisle, getting more angry, shouting at his phone. In the end, after forty minutes, he thankfully loses interest, and wobbles off down the carriage; and we get off at Kings Cross and I do my fast walk to avoid him on the platform.

My cheap but decent hotel is just ten minutes away on the tube, and London looks nice in the sunshine.

LHR

I’m off to Calgary via DFW with American - and test my review of the lounges in terminal three. Cathay Pacific is the nicest, where I have a noodle-based breakfast; American is still the absolute worst, an awful “first class” lounge that is anything but; and the BA lounge is blissfully quiet.

LHR-DFW is an exciting 10-hour flight on American Airlines. I get a platinum phantom next to me, which is nice. The FAs are the most slapdash that I’ve seen so far - efficient but no effort spent on niceties: a collection of jumbled food on a plastic tray makes for a meal.

Getting into YYC quite late, I really, really suffer with jetlag. I don’t normally, but it seems that four nights in the UK followed by another change of -6 hours is enough to really hurt. I’m grateful to past-James who had the foresight to book an airport hotel for the night, even if the hotel’s elevator has clearly got stories to tell.

YYC

While in Calgary - which has a lovely main street with lots of old buildings - I decide that I really don’t fancy the torture of YYC-ORD-LHR-SIN-BNE on the way home. So many long flights. So many long layovers. And I just want to go home - “things” are happening at work that are making me tired and depressed, and I can’t face more than 40 hours in the air flying the wrong way home. So on a whim, I buy new tickets - YYC-ORD-SYD-BNE, cutting my flying time by two-thirds. (Cancelling the AA portion gives me unclarified “flight credit”; cancelling the QF portion is unlikely to give me anything except for taxes, but I should get something back there).

A Westjet flight doesn’t give me any lounge, but that’s fine - I find a bar and get some food. And I do the ORD-SFO flight - just a few hours - in a middle seat, but it’s a Westjet flight and is decent enough.

SFO: your OneWorld lounge guide

I land in SFO with five hours to kill; so thought I’d go and do some work in a lounge.

Air France (Qantas’s official lounge) tells you to go away until 3 hours before. “Come back at 6.30pm”.

British Airways (a OneWorld lounge) is quiet as a mouse, but tells you to go away. “You should use the Air France lounge”, he said, “and anyway, we close at 7pm”. “Can I come in just for an hour?" “No, we’re VERY, VERY busy,” he said. “Oh,” I said. “Thank you for your loyalty,” he added. Fuck you too, I thought.

BUT! You can walk fifteen minutes to terminal one in SFO, and if you do that, the delightful - and new - Alaska lounge will let you in without any questions asked. It’s large, it’s quiet, it has a decently stocked bar, it’s clean and nice and comfortable and excellent. I spent a few hours in there; and everyone was so friendly I finished by sending compliments through the website.

Looking for some noodles, Cathay Pacific (a OneWorld lounge) opens at 7pm - but because my boarding pass was printed by WestJet, they couldn’t scan it to let me in. After five minutes of puzzled looking at their own app, and looking at my Qantas Platinum/OneWorld Emerald digital card, and looking at the app again, they shrugged and said I wasn’t coming in. “We have to follow procedure,” they said.

The Air France lounge dragon complained at my odd-looking boarding pass (it even says “QANTA AIRWAYS” at the top, I notice), but allowed me in after sighting my digital Qantas Platinum/OneWorld Emerald digital card. It has a decent buffet food selection, but is nowhere near as nice as the Alaska lounge. And there is a man in here in non-stop meetings, talking loudly into his Bluetooth headphones about pipelines and due deliverables.

So - in case you wondered… in SFO, the Alaska lounge is the place to be. Hurray!

SFO-SYD

The only window seat on QF74 I could find was the third row from the back; but I grabbed that because I felt I ought to, rather than a middle seat for 14 hours.

And I’m glad I did. On being one of the first on the plane, I walked about a mile towards the back, paused for a coffee and a small snack, continued walking what felt like another two miles, and finally reached my allotted seat. Ah, yes, I forgot - it was a window seat without a window (I’d be sitting next to where a door might have been in another configuration).

I greet the FA cheerily. “Is this where the party is, back here?”

He looks at me and smiles. “There’s an empty row just there,” he says, pointing me to the very back middle seat, which just has a large gap between it and the window. So I have a quiet row all to myself, a proper window, lots of space, and all is right with the world.

Not just that, the food comes out of the galley just behind me; and for the two Platinums who are sitting right at the back, we’re served first. I’m plied with additional drink if I want any (I don’t); when I wake in the middle of the flight, the FA is with me within seconds, wondering if I want a coffee or something; my breakfast comes excellently quickly. Much rather this than a 10-hour flight back to London, a 14 hour flight from there to Singapore, and an 8 hour flight to Brisbane.

The back of the plane is fine by me; and we get into Sydney on time.

I get a quick trip on the bus of disappointment, which seems confused about where it is, and I go to the lounge’s secret Sydney Panini Bar that nobody has yet noticed - skipping all the queues.

It’ll be nice to be home. And, right now, that’s my last flight until March. The question is whether I really want to do that one.