The plan for today was to have a low-pressure day, which is pretty much what happened.
The electrical system in the bathroom finally gave up the ghost (wire worked loose from the breaker was Jono’s guess), so the showering process involved a torch balanced in a toilet roll to bounce light off the ceiling.

I spent the morning packing my bag, which has changed over the trip from being very two full packing cells plus some assorted misc., to being one almost full packing cell in a bag otherwise stuffed with laundry.
I somehow managed to overestimate on t-shirts, and I didn’t buy that many while in London, so I’m not sure how that happened.

In an effort to get out of the apartment, we took a wander along the walking paths on the other side of the river, dodging the occasional cyclist & passing by some allotments.
Saw these yesterday from the train to Lucerne. Every allotment seems to have a good-sized shed, so they look like an overgrown trailer park at first sight. Many of the patches also have a flagpole, with a profusion of Canton & possibly Community flags.

Jono loaded me onto the airport train at Dietikon, & gave me a basic run-down of what to expect at Zurich airport, and it all turned out pretty much as described.
Mostly walking, though there was a little yodelling train which mooed.
They apparently loaded the soundtrack of Swiss Stereotypes for the train PA system.

I got there maybe 10 minutes before early check-in for my flight, but the process was so incredibly slow that I was in the queue for a good half-hour.
No idea why it was so slow; Many check-ins seemed to involve long conversations, explanations, or in one case a phone call.
Finding the appropriate terminal wasn’t a problem, and the hardest part was avoiding a visit to a Sprügli Chocolate Shop, for there were many of these emporia of weight-gain along the route.
There was a patch of excitement when my carry on got diverted to the other track at security, and nobody seemed very interested in telling me why for a few minutes. It turned out that there was too much stuff in there for them to get a decent scan.

(Also, I seem to have learned “Mine Deuche Nicht Gut; Sprechen Sie English” well enough to get the idea across; Most switch to English, or just ask “English?”, before I get through Sprechen)

Got a bit lucky with my seat for the Zurich-Dubai leg, window seat in a two-seat block with no neighbour; Not enough room to lie flat in Economy-Class Nirvana, but the was at least enough space to stack things I didn’t need.
The flight, however, hit a lot of turbulence, to the extent that they just didn’t bother serving hot beverages, because it wasn’t safe.

Dubai … I got to Dubai well before the gate, and therefore the section of terminal, was posted on the big-ass boards, so after a bit of ambling about I went & had breakfast at a Jack Daniels themed restaurant, partially because the omelette looked really good (and it was), but also because they had someone at the door who I could ask about which currencies they accept. (pretty much anything major, but you’ll get your change in dirham)

Dubai Terminal Three is divided into halls A, B, & C, and being in ‘A’, I was fully expecting to have to take the little train to ‘C’, which can take a while; Turns out the flight left from ‘A’, so it was just a matter of circling the hall until I hit the right gate. Unexpectedly convenient.

I ran into some LonCon folks who’d been staying at the same hotel as me while waiting for the gates to open; They’re on the same flight as me, though they’re getting off at Melbourne.

The Dubai to Melbourne flight started badly; Delays loading luggage meant a wait at the gate, and a fault in the air-con meant it was really warm. They eventually fixed the air-con, then loaded the luggage, finally pulled away from the gate, only to have the plane-pushing vehicle break down in front of the plane, so that it still couldn’t move.
When we eventually took off, we must have been at least an hour & a half late.

Right now my aisle-side neighbours, a couple from Australia from the sound of their accents, are asleep on top of each other, which will suck for them when I want to get up.
(Fortunately, they don’t seem to mind too much)

As a side note, Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works 85-92” makes for very relaxing travelling music, if you like that sort of thing; It’s on the aircraft entertainment system.

OK, glad that flight’s over, and I never want to do another flight that long again, or at least not in the window seat.
Had a case of restless legs for the last hour or so, which was less than fun.
I’ve performed the phone-sim-shuffle, so as to warn my ride from the airport that I’ll be late, and it looks like the mobile number for the UK sim was, in fact, on the sim itself. That was going to be my second port of call, if I’d not been able to find a way to get the network to tell me my number.

The transit through Melbourne was easy enough; The plane didn’t move, so we all filed off, through a security scan where they put me through the imaging scanner, and then back almost the same way I’d come to the gate lounge, which was, as near as I can tell, underneath the arrival hall.

Got into a level of misunderstanding with the other person on my row for the Melbourne-Auckland trip; She took my semi-coherent “I’m in the window seat, so if I go in first, you won’t have to move” for some sort of implication that she was going to take the window seat, or refuse to move, or something.
We sorted it out a bit later, while trying to figure out her best options for a really tight international connection at Auckland.
She’d had four hours to make her flight to Santiago, Chile, under the original schedule, but the plane was nearly three hours late on take-off, leaving her with 45 minutes to make a flight for which Emirates couldn’t issue a boarding pass, as it wasn’t one of their partners.
I’ve never done an International Transfer through Auckland, for fairly obvious reasons, so couldn’t give her many specifics, other than “It’s all one building, so security shouldn’t be an issue” and “There are signs for everything, so there must be signs for this too”. (There were; I did follow them for a while as the paths coincided, but then the path lead upstream through Duty Free, against the flow of other passengers, towards the other end of the building. I did get a chocolate from one of the Duty Free bods though.)
My advice was to be the first one off the plane & snag anyone official-looking who wasn’t wearing an Emirates uniform, on the grounds that they’d be an Auckland Airport employee, and make yourself their problem; I’ve seen people rushed through lines & sped around on the little battle-hardened golf carts, so this was surely the time to make that happen.
She took the advice, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether she made it.

I had a brain fade & pulled my passport from the reader too soon, so had to go through an actual manned booth instead of the SmartGate, adding almost thirty whole seconds to the Passport Control process.
Sadly this was not the end of my problems, though at least I didn’t cause the next one.

There was an Emirates Staffer asking people’s names at the baggage carousel, and when she found me on the list, she had some bad news.
Remember those luggage-loading delays at Dubai? It’s fine if you don’t, I’ll wait here while you check back a few paragraphs.

OK, so the problem was apparently a burst pipe; No idea whether it was water, wastewater, or hydraulic, but the result was that some luggage never made it onto the plane, including mine.
To their credit, Emirates already had a list of the affected passengers, and had set up a wee processing area with a document wallet for everyone already printed & the company who’d been delivering the bags on-site. Far as I’m concerned, while it’s annoying, they were handling the problem well.

No problems at Biosecurity, despite having been out in the cheap showyness of Swiss nature, and having forgotten about a little wooden promotional thing from the Wrocław EuroCon Bid people; My shoes were clean, and as far as they were concerned, by the time you can laser-cut a piece of wood, it’s processed enough to be safe.

Rain during the pick-up process didn’t help, but I found a covered spot from which to watch for the arriving parent mobile, and with only my carry-on, diving into the slow moving traffic for a quick getaway was pretty easy.
(To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the drive by; I’d thought it more likely that I’d get through to the arrival hall & get a text message saying “I’m upstairs in the little cafe, where there are chairs and fewer people”.)

And that’s basically it.
I zoned out a bit on the drive back to the parents, but perked up while I was there, so drove back to ‘my’ place at Waiwera in what I think was a safe manner.

A final thing, or things;
This is what you walk through when you get off the plane, before you get to Duty Free or Passport Control or You Ain’t Got No Luggage or anything.

When I talked to the passport control guy after I failed to follow the instructions for the SmartGate machine, once he’d scanned the passport & approved things, he said “Welcome Home”.
After a series of flights that long, it was a surprisingly nice thing to have someone say.