It all started when my wife and I decided to take a five-star bus tour of Western Canada, followed by an Inside Passage cruise that ended with a drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks in Alaska. Our travel company contacted us six months prior to the tour to confirm their planning for our flights back home to Brisbane from Fairbanks. The day they contacted us, they wanted our decision. With a very busy day ahead of us, we quickly agreed on the suggestion.

However, the next day I sat down to time the trip home. It turned out to be 34 hours basically going from one airport to another with layovers of various lengths. At our age, we felt we needed an overnight stop on the way in Vancouver. We contacted the travel company through our travel agent to organize it. We were told that it would cost $ 500 to change flights and that accommodation in Vancouver was very expensive. So we opted to leave the arrangements as they were.

Let me tell you about our flight. To start, we had to catch our shuttle from our accommodation at 2.30am Fairbanks time to be at the airport at 3am. Checking in at the airport created a problem for us because the airline staff member wanted to charge us $ 20 per bag. We had to explain to him that we were not stopping in Seattle, but were going to Australia via Vancouver. International passengers are not charged that rate.

Our next problem was breakfast. We were given a box of food for breakfast that we had to eat near the check-in counter before going through customs to the airport lounge, where we were to board the first part of our flight to Seattle.

Our more than four hour flight to Seattle was incident free. We landed in Seattle where we had a layover of more than two hours. We knew that our luggage would be transferred to our next flight. So all we had to do was find our next departure gate to catch our flight to Vancouver. Other passengers on our flight were in the same situation joined us trying to find their way to that exit door. It took us 30 minutes to achieve that goal.

The hour-long flight to Vancouver was easy. In Vancouver, we made an eight-hour layover. So we agreed to spend that time in an airport lounge where we ate, had the opportunity to shower, read, sleep or have a coffee or a drink. As we walked through the terminal from the plane, we could see our airport lounge below us. However, due to construction work at the terminal, we were taken down a winding route before we could move to the main terminal. We couldn’t find the airport lounge. Fortunately, we asked a gentleman who was driving a golf cart where he was. He took us there telling us that our airline staff should have picked us up from the plane and guided us to the lounge. The airport lounge was “our savior.”

The flight home took fourteen hours. We both struggle with sleep and discomfort. Once we got home, unpacked and headed to bed, we found that it took us two weeks to feel normal again. We enjoyed our trip to Alaska and Canada, but we will never forget our 34 hour plane ride home.

Therefore, our advice for less experienced foreign travelers is to take some time to calculate the hours involved in long flights abroad before agreeing to what is suggested. Consider the night stopovers along the way. We found both Singapore and Dubai worth it. If we were to go to North America again, we would stop over in Hawaii for a day before continuing.