Day 43 - Friday 7th September

Although I was very tired yesterday, I decided to stay up until 10pm before going to bed in order to get back to a normal schedule. In other words, I wanted to be on local time rather than London time.

I had a good night's sleep and didn't wake up until 10am. In fact, it was lucky that I stirred and looked at the time because otherwise I might have slept for hours longer. When I looked out the window, it was bright and sunny - last night's thunderstorm had gone.

My flight for Sydney was to leave at 7:50pm and so when I went down for breakfast, I asked for a late checkout - the normal checkout time is 11am. She said I could stay in my room until 2pm without any additional charge. The buffet breakfast finished at 10:30 and so I had an a-la-carte breakfast instead.

I checked out at 2pm and sat in the lounge to read the newspapers on my iPad. At about 3:45pm, I was starting to get hungry and so I decided I should have a late lunch. The lunch buffet had closed much earlier and so I had a hamburger off the menu.

Although my flight didn't depart until 7:50pm, I'd planned to get the hotel's shuttle bus to the airport at 4:30pm. Amazingly the shuttle was 10 minutes late! I got to the airport by 5pm.

There was a long queue for economy class. When I reached the end of the queue, they got me to use a kiosk machine to print out my boarding pass and then I had to drop of my bags at the counter. Once again the total weight of my two checked bags was 35kg.

I was one of the first to reach the waiting area at the gate and even when they starting boarding there didn't seem to be too many people there. However, when we took off there weren't any empty seats in economy class.

They served dinner at about 10pm and so it was just as well that I'd had a late breakfast and a late lunch.

One of the fascinating things about flying with JAL is the camera they have under the plane. They display this image on the screens in the plane. When you are taking off or landing, you see the runway in front of you. After you take off, they flip the camera to show the city below.