Day 1 - Aberdeen - ,42 Hours on the go !

The thought of commissioning a referendum to position Australia some 10,000 kms closer to the Nthn Hemisphere must i admit cross my mind once or twice as we endured 42 hours on the go & 4 flight legs on our way from Melbourne to Aberdeen Scotland to commence our trip.

The day had not started overly well when security had accused me of planning to disassemble our Royal Brunei plane mid flight thus forcing me to surrender all but one (hopefully the one I'll need to put the bike back together with) of the set of Allen keys I was carrying.

Never the less RB staff worked hard on the state of the art 777 Dreamliner to keep us well fed as we journeyed to Brunei and Dubai on our way to London.

The stop over at Brunei showed that this wealthy country's airport still has a way to go to meet even 3rd world standards with its one small duty free shop and an even smaller cafe somehow meant to entertain hundreds of transiting passengers !

The endurance test picked up a notch on the remaining two 7 hour legs but all seemed to be forgotten as we crossed the British Channel at first light to track down the Thames for a great early morning view of central London while doing 2 lazy 360's awaiting clearance to land.

On the ground and with our bike boxes looking largely intact, we worked our way to Terminal 5 on a double decker bus successfully trapping all passengers on board with our boxes blocking all exits !

After being on the go for 30+ hours we still had another 6 hours prior to our Aberdeen flight so decided to entertain ourselves and nearby passengers by repacking our bike boxes to meet the strict British Airways 23 kg policy only to realize that we'd left all our packing tape back at customs in terminal 4 !

After frantically searching we eventually resealed our boxes with newly purchased tape and proceeded through security trying hard not to look suspicious despite sweating from wearing 3 layers of clothing to reduce our box weights - normally not a bad idea in the UK but as luck would have it todays sunny London day was not helping !

A short 1 & 1/2 hour flight, and 400 metres of bike box dragging later we finally reached our accommodation with just enough energy left to take dinner before crashing to bed dreaming of all the fun we'll have tomorrow reassembling our bikes with our one remaining allen key before we ride into town to catch our evening ferry to the Shetlands !