The Journey Begins – New Zealand Day 1

It had been a while coming but on Tuesday October 16th, after weeks of planning and preparation, our family trip to New Zealand finally began. In case you didn’t already know, it had been a dream location of ours for years but time and money constraints had always meant that it remained just that, a dream. However, my qualification for the ITU Age-Group Triathlon World Champs that were taking place in Auckland this year meant that we threw caution to the wind, took the necessary time off work and blew our life savings on a trip to the other side of the world. And now we were off.

Packed and ready to go

The trip started with a drive to Bristol and my parents house – My parents had decided to come along as well. It was somewhere they had always wanted to go and probably their last chance to go there so with the added impetus of being able to see their eldest son compete in a World Championship event they too were coming along. After the 3 hour drive to Bristol with all of our luggage I dropped Anna and Morgan off at my parents house and then jumped back in the car and drove to Yate for a quick swim in the pool there. It was less than a week to the World Championship race itself so this wasn’t a training session looking for improvement, but with days of travelling and presumed jetlag to look forward to it was more a case of keeping myself moving and active at any opportunity.

It was actually quite a nice swim, just an easy 500m warm up following by 5x 100m hard and a 500m cool down. Just what I needed before our drive to Heathrow.

The drive to Heathrow (via Purple Parking) went without incident, although the car was full to the brim with the five of us, all our luggage and my bike in it’s bike box. Once at Heathrow we met with Graham, Sharon and their son Charlie who were also travelling out. They belong to the same triathlon club as me and had also qualified for the race. We were soon in the queue and checking in for Flight MH001 with Malaysia Airlines.

Graham and Sharon had loads of problems checking their luggage in though. We had initially been told that athletes would have 30kg of baggage allowance whereas non-athletes traveling with them would have 20kgs. This was later updated to 30kg for everyone, and I had the email to prove it. We didn’t need it as despite the bike and bike box our total luggage weight came to 54kgs, well under the 70kg we had in total even under the original allowances. This wasn’t the case for Graham and Sharon though because with two bikes they had 89 kgs of luggage – 1 kg under the new allowances but the check-in staff weren’t using these new allowances and were only allowing them 80kgs between them (2x 30kg for Graham and Sharon but only 20kg for Charlie). Worse still, the extra luggage was going to cost the close to £500, not the £35 we had been told.

We sailed through but they were there for ages, even after they’d borrowed the email confirmation we had with us to show them that they had been told they now had a 90kg allowance. In the end they had to take stuff out of their hold luggae and put it in their carry-on luggage. Silly really as it ends up being the same amount of weight onboard the plane, but ‘rules is rules’ and they eventually joined us in departures where we were soon boarding the flight, on time and looking good.

Flight MH1

All went smoothly for us and the flight was good. 6589 miles and 12 hours 22 minutes to Kuala Lumpur for a 4.5 hour stopover. The food on the plane was nice though and although we didn’t have a window seat which I particularly wanted we were fairly comfortable – if you can call economy class for 12 hours comfortable. I didn’t manage to sleep though and this lack of sleep was going to catch up with me, especially seeing as I hadn’t slept much more than an hour or so for the previous two nights either – I think it was the excitement and nerves for the race keeping me awake at home and then the  noise and discomfort in the plane.

We were on our way.

Tags: New Zealand