Heading home

Alas it was time to head home from Europe.

Why? Because we’d booked tickets for the Oasis concert on Melbourne Cup night! So we’d booked our flights to arrive home about 24 hours earlier.

I’d pondered taxi vs train to Barcelona airport. Two of our party leaving the following day were going via taxi, in part because they had more luggage. In fact they’d installed the Barcelona taxi app in preparation for it. Good plan.

But I was interested to see how the train would go, given the R2 line to the airport served our local station. 10am flight, so aiming to be at the airport about 3 hours earlier, so catching a 6:32am train on a Sunday morning? Oof, that’s pretty early for me, but okay.

The current R2 service to the airport is only half-hourly, though there’s a more frequent metro line, but that involves a change of trains. Buses are also available. So there are plenty of options.

An improved more frequent R2 service will be introduced when they complete an upgrade of the airport line.

Until then, the R2 line only serves terminal 2. From there we needed to access terminal 1, and it’s not particularly a quick transfer. Out of the station, along a long bridge over the car park, down through the terminal and eventually we found the shuttle bus stop.

The shuttle bus is frequent, but it was quite a distance around the airport. All up from getting off the train at terminal 2 to reaching terminal 1 was about 25 minutes – this was on top of the train journey itself which took a similar amount of time. Perhaps we should have swapped to the Metro. No matter – we got there in plenty of time.

You can see the loop around the airport on the Google Maps timeline for this day:

It was Sunday morning in Barcelona, which meant Sunday afternoon in Melbourne. In our family some of us usually have a group video call at that time, so I mischievously dropped into it unexpectedly from outside the terminal so we could say hello and chat for a few minutes.

We got our luggage checked in, went through customs and all the checks, and found some breakfast.

As departure time approached, we headed to the gate. We probably sprung out too early, and ended up sitting around, watching a Dalek-like cleaning robot moving around, politely harassing people to get out of its way.

Eventually we boarded. The flight was Barcelona to Milan (a taste of Italy, but without leaving the plane – apparently this is due to something called Fifth Freedom Rights) then on to Singapore.

Back at Singapore we changed planes and terminals again, with more sitting around.

Then onto the second plane.

I wiled away the time on both flights trying (and mostly failing) to sleep, watching videos, being fed too much food, and reading about my home town and its chic, trendy, bohemian and beachy suburbs. And its renownedĀ (sic) museum.

We landed back in Melbourne on a rainy evening. Welcome home.

The holiday was over, but such fun, such great memories.