Europe | USA Summer 2023 - Day 1: Travel Day
Welcome
Yesterday we convened in Amsterdam in anticipation of our imminent bicontinental musical performances tour.
I was the first to leave as I had the farthest to travel. My Air New Zealand Boeing 787-9 departed from Auckland International Airport at 10.05am on a fresh winter morning, and eleven hours later I could feel Singapore’s tropical climate seeping into the airbridge as I disembarked into Changi Airport’s Terminal 3. It had a been a pleasant flight thanks to the surprising free recognition upgrade I had received allowing me to pass this half-day of flying in the comfort of premium economy, and its generous 2-3-2 seating configuration. The hot towelettes they served at the beginning and end of the flight felt luxurious, as did the footrest I was able to deploy into the abundance of space in front of my seat.
I had seven hours to kill before my connecting flight and I spent a good number of these hours exploring Jewel, the shopping mall that sits in between the airport’s main three terminals. The mall’s roof is constructed from 9000 pieces of glass that form what has been described as a sprawling toroidal dome. I hadn’t come across this particular term before but from what I understand a toroid is like a hollow donut shape (not to be confused with a torus which is a solid donut shape) and if having a glass donut roof wasn’t already spectacular enough this one has a 40m waterfall emerging from the hole, dumping 38,000 litres per minute of water into a catchment on the ground floor.
I spent a long time admiring the HSBC Rain Vortex, an experience that was only improved by the presence of huge Avengers statues like Captain America and Iron Man standing proudly about, and dramatic film music blasting though speakers that were hidden in the surrounding gardens.
My next flight was a Singapore Airlines Airbus A350, and it rotated out of Changi at midnight local time with me seated firmly in economy class for the thirteen and a half hour flight time. Thankfully I slept for most of this and was only roused by the breakfast service which emerged as we were flying over Romania. My meal was billed as Nasi Lemak, with chicken and fish cakes, and came with a side of cold fruit, yoghurt, and a bread roll.
At 7am my aircraft smoothly touched down at Amsterdam Airport Schipol and disembarked us into the terminal where I passed through immigration and headed to retrieve my suitcase. Twenty-four hours early Gabe had rotated out of Melbourne Airport aboard an Airbus A350-1000 operated by Cathay Pacific, and flown northwest for 7000kms, landing at Hong Kong International Airport for a brief stopover. After dashing down to the other end of the terminal and going through transit security he headed back to his gate and reembarked onto the same aircraft which had been freshened up, and continued the journey northwest, crossing a large amount of the Asian continent on its 9000km journey to western Europe. He landed twenty minutes before me, and we met outside the arrivals hall to make our way together to the hotel.
We were pleased to learn that Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport is nicely plugged in to the city’s extensive public transport network and it was less than a five-minute walk from the arrivals hall to our train platform, from where we were able to catch a €5 train that dropped us off 200m from our hotel. The rest of our morning was taken up with feeding, cleaning, and caffeinating our bodies, and then in the afternoon we settled in front of the television to watch the Wimbledon semi-finals which were taking place 550km away on the other side of the English Channel.
Tristan and his wife Marsha had arrived in Amsterdam the previous evening after a multi-modal journey that saw them embark on a Vaporetto water bus in Venice followed by an ATVO airport bus which delivered them to Marco Polo Airport. There they boarded a KLM Boeing 737-800 for a short diagonal hop across the European continent and after landing it was only a short ride on the Sprinter train from Schipol Airport to the hotel. Tristan and Marsha had spent the last three weeks traveling around Italy and when Gabe and I met them for dinner yesterday they were more than ready to take a break from eating Pasta. We dined at a traditional Dutch pub in the city centre and spent a lovely couple of hours getting caught up on the events of the previous few weeks.
Thankfully, Liz and Jon also made it to Amsterdam yesterday. They had spent their break in a little town in eastern Spain called Chelva, where they had enjoyed a quiet lifestyle while enduring the recent heatwaves that have been sweeping across Europe. They flew out of Valencia on an Austrian Air Airbus A320 and then another A320 landed them in Amsterdam in the early evening. They were glad to arrive to much more reasonable temperatures but were also exhausted after a huge travel day, so they opted out of our dinner plan, choosing instead to have a good night of rest.