Iceland Megatrip 2005 – Day 1

Well just a little over a year ago, the four members of the Palsson family “stranded” in Brisbane, Australia started off on a trip bigger than Ben Hur to go to the quinquennial clan gathering in Reykir and to see the land. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to whilst on the trip as I was to busy living it up, so I have decided to blog about it a year on 🙂

Day 1

Sean drove us to the airport (BNE) and by the time we got to the check-in desk for Singapore Airlines we were already bickering overs omething – who had the frequent flyer numbers, who should go first etc etc, which gave the desk attendant a good laugh. After checking in we broke up to have a look round the duty free shops and we then met back up with Mum and Pabbi to grab a bite to eat. After sitting round for a while we finally able to go through Customs/security and down to the gate. So we bid farewell to Sean and made our way down stairs. Where we were greeted by this fantastic fountain.

Once we were all through Customs/security we looked at even more duty free shops, mainly just marvelling at all the different types of alcohol which we do not see in our regular bottleos and of course at the price (cheap), after a while though this of course got boring so we made the short trip to our gate and broke out our entertainment.

As we made our way onto the plane we were greeted by our delightful stewards and stewardesses and the complimentary newspapers which I grabbed to have a read of the news from the SE Asia perspective, it was quite nice to read the Straits Times and some others which I can’t recall.

Air travel with Singapore Airlines is very, very nice, just after take off the warm face washers came round which would then again come round just before we landed and before the meals. Very, very nice. We also had quite a range of entertainment with Movies and TV shows on demand, Nintendo games, puzzles, radio stations and a wide range of albums which meant that you could program your own radio station.

Flying north over Australia was amazing and I spent a fair bit of time at the back of the plane looking out the window at the land below, it was just great to see the landscape.

After about 8 hours of flying we landed at Changi Airport Singapore (SIN).

One of the first things we had to do here was to make a hurried call to Sean to get him to pick up Mum’s notebook that she had left behind with all the plans and addresses in and post it to Aunty Margaret in Tasmania who would be joining us a week into our trip.

No one could say that Matthew is an average person, he rocked his way around SIN in the above get-up and the toothpick in his mouth was there almost the entire time. Matthew and I split off from Mum and Pabbi and browsed the duty free shops, looked in the 7-11 to see if they had slurpees (no :)), had a blast on the free internet access and I ended up buying a bottle of Lemoncino.

When we got on the plane again, we had the same service as before, so no need to go in to that. I loved watching our plane make its way over Eurasia and again spending more time looking out the window to see the land below, though since we were flying through the night it was just limited to the lights which were still amazing. Flying over India we could see the long strait highways which were covered with trucks making their way across the land.

Eventually we saw this on our screen and that meant that the first leg of our trip was almost over, we were almost at London Heathrow Airport (LHR).