Flight Over to HK

Cathay Pacific lives up to the hype.  The closest we’ve come to this kind of a flight experience before is when we flew Business Class on Singapore Airlines, and this even beats that.

First, there’s more room in the space.  There are only 6 seats in First Class, and we have two of them.  The seat is big enough for both of us to sit in together (although we aren’t – there’s such a thing as too much togetherness) and when it’s made out into a bed – which turns out to be most of the flight, it’s not much worse than the average sofa bed.

Jammies

We are in tandem – Seats 1C and 2C – and the flight attendants were quick to bring us a toiletry kit (which, interestingly enough doesn’t have a razor or shaving cream, despite being labeled as for men) and our pajamas – which, we were pleased to find out, actually fit.  Nice heavy cotton jammies, a sleep mask and slippers all in a carry bag.

Before bedtime, though, was dinner.  And wine.  Started off with a bowl of warm cashews, then went through a meal that gets the highest praise one can give airline food – we would have ordered it on the ground.  And lots of wine.  Did I mention that?

The descriptions in the menu don’t do the food justice.  We both thought the niftiest thing, though, were the little grilled cheese sandwiches IN the tomato soup.  The description says “croutons”, which, to my mind, is “crunchy”.  The main course was worthy of a nice restaurant, too.  I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

So there were some things that were a little uncomfortable. Like on a cruise ship, there’s not quite enough time between “eat 3x what you usually would” and “lie down.”  Let’s pause a moment to thank the Universe for Gaviscon.  And Pepsid.  And Chewable Tums.  And the fact that we remembered to pack them where we could get to them.

So the bed was pretty good, for sleeping on an airplane.  Like a camper table, there are dips where the cushions meet, but they put a thick pad down that makes most of that go away and you have a comforter that is too warm, if anything.  In fact, that’s probably the only complaint we’ve had – can’t regulate the temperature and it’s just a little warm.  If there were a blower or fan, it’d be kind of nice.

Bed

Just like sleeping on a camper bed, though, it ain’t home.  We are in an aluminum tube going who knows how fast over the Arctic Circle, and it was a little bumpy during dinner (insert video) but that ended pretty quickly.

There were still a few bumps during the night, but nothing spectacular – think county road when it’s not an election year).  I kept wanting to tell Stitch to quit scratchin’. 

There is enough room, though, to lie down flat and they give you these wonderful noise-cancelling headphones.  Other than the lack of NPR, there wasn’t anything that I would have changed about it.

Here’s the weird thing about it, though.  To accommodate the time change, we start trying to live on the new time as soon as we get on the plane.  “Dinner” happened sometime about 3:30 and it was dark outside and they were folding out the beds at 5:30. 

And it was fine, because we were ready to sleep.  Amazing how tired you realize you are when there’s a chance to unplug from everything and sleep.  Except, of course, then sleep wouldn’t come.  2 movies later sleep finally started to come.  Plus, although I couldn’t find NPR to sleep to, I did find a couple of the TED Radio Hour, which is just about as good.

At least for sleeping.

Some pics from the flight over 

PS.  It's 332am and I'm wide awake (EB)