We started our first travel day with a walk round Mount Maunganui with Mum then it was up to Auckland to fly out. Fortunately I’d looked at my airline app a week prior and realised our flight had been pulled forward an entire 90 minutes! 

A smooth swap of our car to SK. I’d managed to check in online so an efficient bag drop. 

Little R is STILL little even all these years later, as we approached security she was walking ahead of us and a marshal asks loudly ‘who’s with this child’

Me in my head : do I claim her or not 🤔 

Me out loud : me?

Well it WAS worth claiming her as we were instructed to not scan our boarding passes and to stay left.

The families with young children fast pass line! Oh YES!!!!

After milling around. We all boarded on time only to be held up 25 minutes as ground crew were still loading our luggage and cargo.

Finally off, and what a beautiful day to fly out of Auckland. Oh how I’ve missed that Boeing whine as the engines go full thrust and we thunder down the runway! 

A planned maintenance stop in Adelaide, everybody and all carry on gear OFF the plane, through transit only to mill around and get back on the same plane! In transit we got water we’d just been given on the plane taken off us! Actually quite amusing, or infuriating, depending on how you look at the situation! 

While we were at it we picked up a few more passengers, topped up on fuel and off we went, fully laden with people/gear/fuel to Doha. We sat at 30,000 feet and endured about 7 hours of light to medium turbulence! None of Team Knowles cared, we all slept through most of it! Once we got up by India we increased to 36,000 feet and the air space was much smoother!! I’d love to know why we got limited to 30,000 cause that seatbelt sign did not get turned off but the bathrooms still had to be used during all those hours.

A smooth stop over in Doha in a beautiful new masssssssive airport! Two active runways which are built up so high off the sandy scrap land. Taxiing took forever on our way out again. Flew over some high risk countries so was very happy to be at 34,000 feet! Thanks to being a Qatar airways club member I got free wifi onboard so it was lovely to catch up on a few text messages.

Smoothly into Amsterdam and was so very relieved to see our AirTags notifications pop up on our phones – our luggage had made it. Phew!!! Schiphol is notoriously bad for loosing luggage and for big looooong lines for customs – fortunately we didn’t experience either!

Exhausted we picked up our rental car, blitzed round a supermarket for supplies (I purchased a bunch of tulips since they’re the whole reason we’re here now, $5 NZD score!) We found our Airbnb, settled in, and very quickly konked. Everyone slept all night! 

It was 42.5 hours door to door. A mammoth effort by everyone holding it together, so proud of my team!

Till next time,

Claire