On Our Way Starting our Trip Around-the-World.

January 2-7, 2025 - From the itinerary: Overnight at the Hilton Garden Inn at LHR terminal 3. Fly on to Oslo. Overnight at the Radisson Blu at Oslo Airport. Start the ATW (around the world) and fly Oslo - England (change planes) - Johannesburg, South Africa. Overnight at the Protea Hotel and the airport. Fly on to Entebbe.

This is our luggage for six months of travel.

No real issues in getting to Oslo,

other than the long walk to the Hilton Garden Inn,

the flight to Oslo being about 90 minutes late (no crew) and getting our cart stuck in the snow at the Oslo Airport on the way to the hotel. Dinner on BA (chicken curry) was amazingly good and the crew was very attentive.

We started our ATW from Oslo because the tickets were much less expensive. We are allowed 16 segments on our ATW which meant we had to fly back to the UK to pick up our non-stop to Johannesburg (had to go West to fly East).

Oslo was cold and snowy. The hotel was our normal Radisson Blu - typical airport hotel. We were too tired and lazy to go into town, so had an overpriced dinner in the hotel - $100 for a ceasar salad, a hamburger and two small sparkling waters. The bed was incredibly soft.

Breakfast was great - no photos. Had salad, and herring, and greek yogurt and fruit.

The first segment of ATW was back to LHR. Oslo has started to implement the new Schengen Visa infrastructure and the line to get through passport control was abysmal, about 30 minutes. Thankfully we started early and the flight was running a bit late.

Being a woman of a certain age, I've decided to start dressing a bit better and had my hair cut. I wanted to look neater when I travel. I've never been yelled at or ignored by various staff as much as I have during the last 3 days. First it was too many carry-on bags and no offer to consolidate - this after Chris got through without issue. Then I was told to take my feet off the bulkhead of the plane. In all my years of flying that has never happened. I was given an extra long security pat-down today, as well. I'm not going to dress nicely any more. I have similar issues with any customer support call - they don't listen and don't answer the question I ask. Enough and am off the soapbox now.

It was a lovely flight and a great crew.

The meals, which i forgot to photograph, were about a 5/10. I had the soup (it was cold, although supposed to be hot), the chicken (which was hot) and cheese for dessert. Breakfast was an omelet.

Landing in Johannesburg was a bit of an eye opener because there was a line of about an hour to get through passport control. Our flight got in after a few other big planes. At least our bag was on the carrousel by the time we got there.

We stayed at an airport hotel called the Protea which is airplane themed and a part of the Marriott chain. I really liked it and it had a great gym and the room was kind of quirky. There was an engine fan. The shower had a curtain which wrapped around and a bath tub.

We had a drink before dinner - a tequila sunrise.

We started dinner with champagne to celebrate a successful trip. Then we continued with cheddar cheese soup and biltong soup and a buddha bowl with tempura shrimp. I think the soup was a bit heavy, but I was happy to try it.

Breakfast was quite a nice buffet.

Just after we agreed when we were leaving the hotel, Chris noticed our flight was 3 hours delayed, but the change didn't appear to be consistent. To be on the safe side we left the hotel at our planned time and went to the airport, where the delay was confirmed. We spent the time in the very nice airport lounge (not being facetious) - the food was quite nice and healthful.

The flight was also quite nice. Dinner was one of my better airline meals - I had chicken and rice and Chris had lamb and couscous.

We landed about 9pm and waited through a very slow passport control process where our actual visas were issued. Thank goodness there weren't many people on our flight and we weren't behind any other flights.

We met Moreen "after the guerilla" and drove to the hotel. It was very dark, so we couldn't get much of a sense of the place. We were shown to a very nice suite with air con that worked.

We had a welcome drink and then went off to get some much needed sleep.