It’s a long way from Canberra to most places. Dublin is no exception. In fact I think it’s the second furtherest I’ve travelled in a single block, the longest being Melbourne to Iceland.
Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, London, a brisk walk in shorts and a t-shirt between terminals, Dublin.
When I first booked tickets over 12 months ago it was the usual Canberra to Sydney to Singapore to London. Over the course of the next 12 months Qantas made something like 8 changes to my tickets - usually just a change in flight number at the same time between Sydney and Canberra on the return leg, then at some point they changed it completely from via Singapore to ‘direct’ via Perth.
When the direct flights from Perth to London were first introduced I was kind of excited. I don’t enjoy being cooped up in a cramped space for hours on end, but at the same time I am capable of doing nothing for extended periods and just zone out quite well. I’m also short enough that I can stretch out quite well in a seat. This trip was booked using Frequent Flyer points and I had enough to opted for Premium Economy - something I am very thankful for.
Premium Economy on a 787 does feel like a really good value option if you want more space and comfort but can’t afford the lie-flat Business Class. The seats are wider. They recline more. There is enough room under the seat in front to stretch out and they have pillows that hook onto the headrest that genuinely make an enormous difference to comfort. As nice as the seats are, 18 hours in a plane is still 18 hours in a plane and I still need infinite TV shows and podcasts and music to help with the zoning out. Good thing my brain works in a way that means I will prepare for every eventuality - which also means overpacking for any trip 😕
What TV shows would I want to watch? How many? What about podcasts (I have hundreds of hours queued, the privilege of working from home and basically no commute)? Do I need to make sure I have all of my audio books I won’t listen to? What media players should I take? How many earphones? Do I need ones to use when my wireless ones are recharging? Yes, the answer is yes. The seats, what type of USB do they have to charge things? USB-A, make sure you have a USB-A cable.
Making use of a power points in Perth ahead of next leg of the flight. While I am USB-C all the things, I know USB-A is still very prevalent.
I off-lined 130GB of video onto my iPad, and then the day before I downloaded a couple of hours of fresh YouTube. But, then just in case I needed to free up space on my iPad or if there was something else I wanted to watch over the course of the whole trip I had an SSD and a USB drive loaded up. Just in case. I had several pairs of wireless earbuds with noise cancelling, and my big Sony headphones - which I never ended up taking out of the case. AirPods Pro noise cancelling is about 85-90% of the big over ear Sonys and they pack an awful lot smaller 🤨 The other advantage of earbuds is I can wedge myself in the corner of the seat with the pillow on the headrest and try and sleep.
I planned out my distractions for each of the flights. Canberra to Melbourne was just podcasts and phone games. Melbourne to Perth was podcasts and YouTube (on my phone), I’d save TV shows on the iPad for the 18 hour leg.
Busy downloading YouTube videos to my phone for the next leg.
With all my careful planning and gigabytes of downloaded content I settled in and put on the Qantas-provided noise cancelling headphones and watched Barbie on the seat back entertainment system. It saved me from getting my iPad out and was a really good movie I hadn’t seen. They also had Oppenheimer available, possibly a perfect opportunity to do the Barbie-heimer double - but that still felt like something I wanted to watch on big screen with surround sound and no announcements cutting into the film every so often.
A few hours into the flight I moved on to some podcasts I didn’t care about, with the idea of falling asleep would be a good thing and if I did I wouldn’t care that I had missed something. Then I moved on to audio books of UK radio panel shows that I also didn’t care about. For some reason it is infinitely easier to fall asleep watching or listening to something I care about. Then it was time to get my Walkman out, and plug in wired earphones that wouldn’t run out of battery and listen to sounds of thunderstorms on repeat until I fell asleep.
While cycling between different earphones and or media players and or content I think I did manage to get a few hours of sleep. I would occasionally wake up from some bizarre dream thinking it must have been at least an hour, but it had only been 20 minutes. Nearer the end of the flight I did start watching some TV shows on my iPad.
After what didn’t feel anymore than 14 or 15 and a half hours we landed in London.
The thing with flying anywhere from Canberra is you are always going to have at least one stop somewhere before getting out of Australia, and then if you are going to Europe you are also going to have a stop somewhere, usually. 7 years ago flying into Spain from Australia I had two stops, one in Singapore and a second in Dubai. Getting back on the plane in Dubai and seeing that there was still another 7 hours to go was demoralising. Two stops and lots of hours in a plane and still 7 more hours to go?
4 hours, a short stop in Perth, then 18 hours and you’re in Europe, or 7 hours to Singapore and then another 14 hours? Honestly, 14 hours doesn’t feel a lot shorter than 18, but 4 hours from Melbourne to Perth barely warrants a mention compared with 7 hours to Singapore.
If you got this far, I can only apologise, but since you did make it this far, here are 3 fantastic podcast episodes you should definitely listen to. I didn’t fall asleep during any of these. It is probably impossible to fall asleep while laughing as hard as I was at Frankie Boyle.
Off Menu Podcast - Frankie Boyle (Live in Glasgow) -Spotify Link or Pocket Casts
We Can Be Weirdos - How To Cheat Britain’s Got Talent: Daliso Chaponda and the Malawi Prayer Syndicate - Website or Pocket Casts
Once billed as Malawi’s only comedian, Daliso Chaponda shot to fame on Britain’s Got Talent and has since performed to sell-out audiences around the world and become a regular on TV and radio. Daliso is also the writer, creator, and host of his Rose d’Or nominated BBC Radio 4 show Citizen of Nowhere.
Decoder - Why Google Search feels like it’s gotten worse - Website or Pocket Casts
If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now. So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed the web in its image. Mia and I really dug into this to explain why search results are so terrible now, what Google is trying to do about it, and why this is such an important issue for the future of the internet.
