I always feel a certain amount of anxiety when making the journey to the ship and with every step along the way that anxiety decreases until we actually get on board. Today our journey started with a drive from Somerset to Heathrow where we parked the car in the Terminal 5 long stay and made our way to T5 using the transfer bus from the car park. We then caught the Heathrow Express to T3 for our Emirates flight to Dubai.
The reason for using the car park at T5 was because our homeward bound British Airways flight from Nice flies into that terminal which is of course a different terminal from the one we left from. We decided that it would make much more sense to not have to do the longer journey on the return leg thus allowing us to get home quicker.
Our flight to Dubai took 7 hours and the plane itself is an absolute masterpiece of engineering. So many little additional features including the capacity to view 3 different camera angles on the outside of the plane.
On arrival at Dubai airport we were kept waiting in the arrivals hall for over 50 minutes with over a dozen or so really slow moving long queues, all stood there in quite a humid conditions. Eventually we made it through with our freshly stamped passports and found the Costa rep who directed us and about another 20 or so passengers to a coach which took us to the ship. Embarkation was swift and I checked my watch as I was boarding the ship and it said 2:35am. Quite a strange feeling to be boarding a ship at that hour.
Our cases were very soon with us in our cabin so we quickly unpacked before going to the buffet which they had left open until 4:00am for us. Judging by the amount of other people about we weren’t the only ones arriving at this strange time of the day.
We eventually retired to bed at just after 5:00am, tired but happy to finally be onboard the ship.
