Besides being a lovely plane to fly in the A380 is seriously
big. It can carry over 520 passengers,
is 72.7m long, 80m wide, 10 storeys high, weighs 580 tonnes and can carry 3,000
suitcases in its cargo hold. The
individual entertainment system has countless choices. I watched the whole Grand Designs (UK
house building show) series, again, an absolute favourite of mine.
Landed at Heathrow London and eventually disembarked at
Terminal 3 at 12:35pm. My flight to Zurich was due to leave
from Terminal 5 at 1:20pm which would mean the gate would close about 1:00pm.
I thought at the time there was no way to make it, but then I got
lucky. The terminal transfer bus just
happened to be leaving as I got on board.
At Terminal 5 I took the fast-track lane at Customs and again at
security and made it onto the plane just as they were closing the gate. to save
time. To save time I hadn’t even put my belt back on at the security
screening. When you think it can't be do, as they say in
the Nike ad ‘just do it’. However, I would much rather wait an hour at the
airport than rush like that again, not that I had any choice.
Landed in Zurich after a pleasant 1-hour flight. The Customs formalities took about 10 seconds
once I had reached the front of the queue. Upon switching off the flight
mode on my mobile phone I received a text message from Qantas stating that my
luggage had not made the flight. I suspected it wouldn't have considering
the short time between flights. However, every cloud has a silver lining,
as it turned out they would deliver my bike box to the motel for me. I
just had to catch the train into the city with my hand luggage and find the
Hotel Senator, a much easier proposition. I had been to Zurich
once before in 2005 on a day trip on the train from Germany with Graham Watson. It impressed me then, particularly because of
the fairly spectacular lake that it sits on and the old part of the city.
Zurich is the largest city in
Switzerland
with about 400,000 people. Not a big
population considering it has been settled for about 2000 years, with evidence
of human activity dating back 6,500 years.
The Roman actually established it in 15BC. The city itself sits at the northern tip of
the lake which unsurprisingly was made by a glazier. Zurich is one of the largest financial centres
in the world and has many museums, art galleries and stacks of interesting
architecture both very old and new.
The bike box was eventually delivered at 8:30pm giving
me time to unpack everything and put the bike together for a ride in the
morning.
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