Written by Me and my dad recently went to Europe. The countries we visited were Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. This was a different trip for me, then trips I have been on in the past. Not only was this my first time in Europe, but it was also the first time I did most of the planning for the trip. One of the things I was fortunate to have while booking flights was a little bit of freedom. Usually most people just pick the absolute cheapest flight to wherever they want to go, but this time the flight route was more meticulously picked for other reasons than just price. This route was still one of the cheapest ways to get to Europe, but that’s not actually why me and my dad selected it. The route we chose to fly was SFO-LHR with British Airways. This was because the first of two daily flights with British Airways is flown on the Airbus a380. Flying on this aircraft is truly special, especially since it is going out of service, since its mostly not really economical for airlines to use. We selected seats on the top deck of the aircraft, which has a mini economy cabin in the back. We later upgraded the flight from SFO-LHR to premium economy since there was a pretty good deal on the upgrade.
July 24:
We drove to SFO airport for our 3:30 flight to London. Once we found the long term parking at SFO, we then took the airport tram to International terminal A where our flight would depart from. We cleared security and then walked to the centurion lounge in terminal 3. At first we didn’t realize how far away the lounge actually was, so we found out that it was 1.5 miles away from our gate. I unfortunately got some blisters on the back of my feet since I was wearing a new pair of shoes that wasn’t broken in yet. After spending a few hours in the lounge, where we ate lunch, we walked to our gate to board our flight. While walking to the gate we stopped at an airport shop where we bought refillable water bottles, and some snacks. We boarded our flight through the U1L(upper 1 left) door, which was attached to a jetway. This was definitely an interesting experience since the upper deck of the a380 was above the terminal level, so we had to walk up to board instead of down, which is definitely a weird feeling. The seats we had booked which where seats 66J and 66K(my seat), which were the best seats I have ever flown in myself. They had 38″ of pitch, which is the distance between one point on a seat, and the same point on the seat in front of it, and a width of 18″. It really felt huge, especially with the upper deck’s special lockers due to the curvature of the airframe. We eventually pushed back and taxied out for departure. I had expected that we would take runway 28L or 28R for departure since they are the longest runways at SFO with about 12,000 feet of runway, but we didn’t. We took runway 01R for departure which is 8,650 feet long. To my knowledge, this is the shortest runway in the world that the a380 regularly uses. When we had boarded I noted that it felt weird for me to not be wearing the shoulder belt that is in the airplane that I use for flight school. Taking off in the a380 was also a weird experience, since we didn’t even hear the buildup of the engines, it just sounded almost silent. (We were wearing noise cancelling headphones, but even with those you can still hear the engines spool up for takeoff) The flight was pretty smooth and clocked in at just under 10 hours, wheels up to wheels down. It was definitely the best flight I have ever taken from a pax experience.
July 25:
Once we deplaned, which didn’t take very long, we went through immigration which also didn’t take very long thanks to passport scanning machines for British, American, Canadian, and EU citizens. We then took the Heathrow Express and Elizabeth lines from terminal 5 to terminal 4. We unfortunately had to wait for about 45 minutes before we could check in for our flight to Amsterdam due to a Heathrow airport policy. We spent that time getting food, which was surprisingly not that bad, considering it was cooked in England. We eventually went through security where we found our gate and went to the lounge. We spent about an hour and a half in the lounge, where I got a refreshing 30 minutes of sleep. We then boarded another new aircraft type for me in a KLM e195-e2 for the 40 minute flight to Amsterdam. After waiting in the conga line for around 15 minutes, we finally took off from a wet London Heathrow. I quickly fell asleep and woke up about 25 minutes later with just 15 minutes left until we touched down in Amsterdam. We landed on runway 18R, otherwise known as the Polderbaan, since its very far away from every terminal area at the airport. We then taxied to a bus gate which took us to the immigration area which went by quite quickly. We then moved into the plaza area at schiphol airport where we waited for our train. Our route to Liege, Belgium, where we would stay for the race, would take us on three different trains. Schiphol airport-Utrecht Centraal, Utrecht Centraal-Maastricht, and Maastricht–Liege-Guillemins station. The first train to Utrecht was a quick 40 minutes, and the train to Maastricht would be about 2 hours. This was rough, since we were already struggling to stay awake. We then transfered onto a train to Liege, which also took about 40 minutes. Once we found our way out of Liege train station, we found a taxi which took us to our airbnb. Overall, this all took about 29 hours from the flight taking off from SF, to arriving at the Airbnb in Liege. The two of us each took a quick shower, which was desperately needed by this point, and quickly fell asleep. I have found that one of the best things for dealing with jet lag is to arrive at your destination at night, since its pretty much time to go to sleep anyway.
