Europe, with an Arctic cruise, a Balkan tour and bits of France and Malta

[tgh]

I thought was a bit "prepper syndrome-ish" when it comes to packing, but you gazump me...

 

[RooFlyer]

VA1323, dep HBA 12:50 arr MEL 1:05, a few mins early.

1A. Nice, wi-fi enabled flight. Hauling out of HBA. See you in a month.



Two salad-ish choices for lunch on the short flight. I chose the pasta with added chicken on top. Very nice.



First time I’ve been on VA with a checked bag in ages and they had the bag tracking thing. So at least I knew the bag had arrived in Melbourne and sure enough, it came out as one of the first bags.

Then an approx 500 m walk down to the Novotel.

I refuse to use check-in tablets so I waited for an agent to be ready. Just took a few extra minutes. I don’t think anyone else was interested in using the tablets either..



No upgrade and when I walked into my room, it was hot as Hades. A sunny afternoon in Melbourne but the window facing the west just means it’s a radiator. Aircon is absolutely useless. It’s one of those simplified ones where all you can actually adjust is the minimum temperature. Fans are automatic, the mode selector is on automatic and reaching up to feel the fan strength it was almost non-existent.

In spite of the heat it had a nice car park view but afraid that wasn’t good enough to save the room.







Got it changed and I’m now on the top floor on the other side of the hotel.




Accor platinum welcome amenity was a big bottle of water and a chokky creation which was nicely done.

 

[RooFlyer]

A 6 am start and a walk up to international check to check in. That was very quick as was security and immigration.

The SilverKris lounge in the dungeon wasn’t bad for breakfast.

At precisely 8 am an important task for me was to book a ticket to see Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in a couple of days. Tickets go on sale for the day and the following two days. You don’t need a ticket to enter but one gives you a guaranteed entry time and They get snapped up quickly.

8 am AEST is midnight in Paris so very good timing to get first exposure to the tickets for 2 days hence. When I had a look at 7:30 am both today and the next day were sold out and this is very common. So at 8 am I went into the app and started.

The first thing you’ll get is a waiting page. Obviously everyone’s jumping on and the app can only handle so many requests. It opens up in French and I would suggest not choosing the English option as I think it simply restarts the wait again. There is opportunity to go to English on the next page. The wait page gives you approximately wait time at the bottom. When I got on at 8 am exactly the wait was already five minutes. For some reason it blew out to 8 minutes but in the end I think it counted down fairly quickly and I was probably on wait for only about five minutes in.

The image below does not show the bottom where the countdown to your wait time shows.


So it loaded the actual booking page where you nominate the number of passengers and at this point my Internet clagged. I had tried the lounge Wi-Fi earlier and it was really slow so I was just using my mobile data which was working fine up to about 8:05am and then it completely stopped.

The Notre Dame app just stopped and I couldn’t load anything. In a bit of a panic, I went out of the lounge, went upstairs and stood by a window. Started a wait cycle again and got on after about another five minutes and this time I got through the booking OK but my Internet stopped again just as I hit the download button. Oh cough. No, it just wouldn’t load and allow me to download my ticket. I went in again and went to the booking process again but it wouldn’t let me proceed as I as you’re only allowed one booking session per day it seems. Fortunately I checked email and of course the PDF of the ticket was there.

Whew!

Of course relying on Internet at the airport is a bit fraught but I’ve actually never experienced it completely stopping before. But all good!