Travelling To New Zealand – The First Leg LHR to Abu Dhabi.

 

My Dear Beloved Reader,

The title is not exactly true as the very first leg was lugging the luggage that she who must be obeyed has insisted is “absolutely necessary” down the stairs, across the hallway and into our venerated vehicle. It’s been a bitterly cold day with the temperature hovering around 7C and for the benefit of my American friends that’s 46F. I was pleased to leave this:

which happened last night and provided a slightly amusing skating rink this morning. I digress. We had an uneventful but slightly damp journey to London Heathrow Airport and having emptied the luggage onto a variety of carts I entrusted our velocipede into the capable hands of the valet parking team at terminal 4.

Braving the elements we travailed the one hundred feet or so into the terminal and then commenced the half-mile route march to the Etihad First Class check-in area.

Having completed the formalities we were duly ticketed by a very pleasant young lady and duly directed to the Fast Track path, where she who must be obeyed successfully held everyone up:

and we were off to the Etihad Lounge.

This lounge has a somewhat subdued lighting scheme which I suppose is to encourage a restful atmosphere but don’t let the photograph above fool you. A few minutes after it was taken the lounge became quite busy. There is a self-serve buffet bar with an adequate array of food and our waitress was very pleasant. Great coffee!

It wasn’t too long before the appointed hour arrived and we made our way to gate 10 and duly boarded and shown to our seats by lovely Aida who together with her colleagues looked after us in an exceptional manner.

Here’s a short video of our experience boarding the flight to Abu Dhabi;

The First Class cabin was really spacious as you can see from our video

and Diana was very pleased with the extensive menu,

that was prepared, with obvious passion by our in-flight chef “Chi-Chi”.

We were very well looked after by Aida and her colleagues and we soon sat down for a lovely dinner.

To start with we had Meditteranean Mezze which was delicious

and I for one had no worries whatsoever with the calorific content! This was followed by a delicious

loin of lamb. The pudding was so good we scoffed it before we could photograph it. Then we had

our beds made. This was not a seat that recined to a “flat bed” but a proper bed and

we still had our enormous seats.

We’ve now continued our journey and I’m writing this in the Air New Zealnd lounge awaiting our flight to Auckland so, until my next post…….Toodleoo!