Malta Trip #2 - Day 1 - Journey Starts

 

Goes to show you what lengths I would go to for photography, I had slept a few hours in the evening so I could leave in the early hours of the morning. I am one of those people who can sleep at any time, you will hate me. The flight was at 0725 but as I live in Oxford I needed two hours to get to London Gatwick airport as well as some buffer time. Roberta and I agree on that, always get to the airport earlier than you need to. There is a bus that goes from Oxford to London airports called Oxford Airline. It's a nice, comfortable coach that costs between £23 and £28. It used to cost me much less when I was a student but...sigh. Moving on. I took the bus service that picked me up just before 0300 and deposited me at the London Gatwick airport North terminal just before 0500.

 

Roberta had deliberately not picked the cheapest flights this time. She had gone for the flights that could give us the maximum time in Malta for our travel dates and also worked with our accommodation choices. More on that later. We checked-in and dropped our suitcases then directly went to the security rather than hang around.

 

I was really nervous about airport security, I always am. Most of my worry is about holding up the queue behind me. Quick tip, when you get to security, turn left if you can, most people turn right as its their dominant side and as a result the queues are longer on that side. I carry a lot of electronics so I am worried about taking time to take them out of the backpack. No problem this time. I had packed my liquids (just lip balm) in a plastic bag already. My electronics were also packed in small travel boxes with transparent tops. My strategy is to put everything that I can, including my phone, in my jacket pockets before getting to the security conveyor belt. After putting the jacket in a separate tray I walked through the metal detector. I winced as I went through it as I remembered I was still wearing my smartwatch. Then I worried that my expression might trigger an alarm in the security lady watching me walk through the scanner. None of that happened. No beeps or alarms and she didn't pull me aside for personal manhandling. On the return journey, when I was taking my smartwatch off, the security agent there told me not to do it. So, I guess they don't trigger the alarm. My watch is a Ticwatch Pro 3 which is mostly a plastic body anyway.

 

After we went through the security and immigration checks, we still had about half an hour to hang out. So, we had a coffee and shared our Etsy shops with each other. Roberta and I are both new Etsy sellers and didn't know that about each other. Links for our shops in case you want to check them out:

 

Sunny: https://g7printables.etsy.com

Roberta: https://chromaticautomatic.etsy.com

 

The flight was almost full but we got lucky that we didn’t have anybody sitting in the third seat in our row so we had some extra space. Photos from the flight are hardly ever worth the trouble but the views are so amazing that you have to try. I think the ones I got this time were better than I have had before, partially because of my new phone Samsung Note 20 Ultra which has a great camera module, but I am also becoming a better photographer with practice. Some examples here from the airport and the flight.