Long Haul with a Toddler

Sorry to all that I haven't been able to update the blog more regularly. I was hoping to be able to update at least every couple of days but time just kept getting away from me and we were very busy in London. On Monday night we arrived in Croatia ad have been enjoying catching up with family. This is what happened in the first couple of days....


19-11-09
We're finally in London! It is about 7:30pm in London right now and we have just finished our first full day sight-seeing. So far the weather has been pretty good and we're all enjoying ourselves.

I'll go into detail of our jouney so far...

Wednesday 18-11-09
We woke at 7:30am ready to begin our jouney to Europe. The taxi was supposed to arrive at 10am but was really late and we didn't end up leaving the house until 10:30am. Check in took forever as our plane was booked out, but Julie, Steve, Annie and Josh were there to see us off.

Our plane departed at 1:50pm and amazingly Hannah fell asleep during take-off, the turbulence seemed to soothe her to sleep. She woke 2.5 hours later and then played with her toys, walked up and down the tiny aisles and was passed to and from us to mum and dad or Moni, for the next 4 hours! This plane was an older style and didn't have screens on each seat, only the large screen for all to watch which was annoying. We arrived in Brunei at 6:30pm their time, and were supposed to have a short 1hr wait for the connecting flight. However, when Dad went to get our boarding passes they told him that this flight didn't have enough seats for us all! After an agonising 45mins waiting to see whether we would all end up on this flight we recieved our boarding passes just as boarding for people with infants was called and we were suddenly on our way to Dubai!


Hannah and Moni on the plane :)


Brian and I on the plane.

Hannah fell asleep again during take off and as this plane had been refurbished with TV screens Brian and I watched a movie and then ate dinner. Hannah woke after about 2.5hrs again and we repeated a similar process as the previous flight. We arrived in Dubai at 1am their time and as we landed were told that instead of the 1.5hr tranist time we were expecting, the connecting flight had been delayed by 4hrs. This was really frustrating and we were sure that Dubai airport had staged the delay so that the passengers would spend money in the airport ;). Everyone (including us!) returned to the plane with a bag filled with souveniours!


Brian and Hannah in Dubai airport.

I knew that Hannah had done really well with the flight so far, so I was expecting some trouble very soon. I was right as during take-off this time, Hannah started screaming and just didn't stop. Obviously we need to have our seatbelts on until we are up in the air, and so we just had to sit there trying to calm her down for almost 20mins. I felt so bad for her as I could see something was wrong and then Brian (she was sitting in his lap) said that she kept tensing her legs as she screamed and I knew then that she was having trouble doing a number 2, the poor baby. As soon as the seat-belt sign went off Brian tried walking her to the kitchen area, where the flight attendants sit, to try and relax her but she just kept crying and neither of us holding her was doing the trick. So I went and called in the big guns - Grandma to the rescue!!! I knew the little bit of distraction from us might work and she did finally calm down. She went and sat back down with Mum and Moni and finally was able to relax enough to go to the toilet :). She is going to kill me when she reads this in 10 years time but hey, I'm trying to record as much detail as possible!

She fell asleep soon after that and Brian and I both got a little bit of rest.



I was pretty happy with my ear-plugs that I had bought to reduce the ear pressure and even thought they still caused me pain when we landed in both Dubai and London it was nowhere near as severe as last time we went overseas.

Landing in Heathrow took an extra half and hour as the plane kept circling over the airport; we assume they were waiting for clearance. I can now understand why the London area is so cloudy, as when we were flying towards Heathrow the cloud cover was so thick you couldn't see any land at all and then we must have went through at least 10m of cloud cover before we finally started seeing land and houses, it was amazing!

Arrival at Heathrow was pretty smooth and we were out of there in about 20mins. After checking how much taxi's would cost to King's Cross (69 pounds for 2 taxi's!) we decided to take ALL our luggage on the Underground and as I took the elevator down with Hannah we nearly missed the Tube that mum and dad had hopped on! After all that excitement we were happy to see that our hotel was actually very close to the station and we didn't have to walk very far. The rooms are larger than I expected and comfortable.

So overall, I was more than impressed with my darling daughter as it seems she is a born traveller! I've probably made it sound pretty easy as there were certainly some trying moments but overall she was pretty good and made our time fairly easy. She didn't want to play with her toys/books for long, preffering to either sit with Moni, Mum or Dad or walk up and down the plane.

I can understand why people recommend to wait until children are around 3 or 4 before travelling long haul but I think our experience proves that it can be done with preperation and forethought.


My next blog will focus on the first couple of days in London and will hopefully be up in the next day or two.


Comments are more than welcome :)


-Andrea