European Adventure: Getting from Belgium to Abu Dhabi

It is about 7:00 in the morning at our hotel in Abu Dhabi. We only got to bed after midnight (kids were very excited about staying up till midnight!), so the rest of the family are still sleeping.
Outside it is 32'C, but with a feel of 39'C. I thought it best to stay put in the air conditioned bedroom and write about our trip over to here...

On Wednesday morning we packed our car up for the last time. Before we even left NZ, I have figured out how I was going to organise the not-so-big boot to fit everything in. We opted for taking thing in boxes as they stack better than suitcases. For the whole trip I packed the boot the same way. As we acquired more things we just squeezed it into gaps and under the seats.

The boys got quite good at helping to load the car up. It is even more fun doing it with a trolley...

We drove from Breda to the Novotel at Brussels airport. I wanted to stop at Primark to have a last look at some cheap clothes, but couldn't find it. I'm glad we didn't find it. We were running out of diesel, so decided to not drive around looking for a supermarket for dinner food either. Opted for eating whatever random left overs we had.

So we got to our hotel and started unloading the car. This is the first time we had to unload the whole car. It took 5 trolley loads to get it all to our hotel room!!! The room looked like a bombsite. I didn't think there was any way that I was going to fit everything into something to put on the plane...

We somehow managed. Celebrated by having our last Belgian beers, some instant noodles and Dutch cheese for dinner.

We got to bed early, but I was so stressed I couldn't sleep at all. Finally had a nap between 5:30 and 6:30 before getting up to pack the last few things. The boys had to problem sleeping.

We got all our luggage downstairs in 3 trolley loads this time and waited for the shuttle to the airport. The shuttle driver was very helpful loading up our load.

The queue at the check in was very long and it took ages of manoeuvring our 3 trolley around the zigzag queue. We finally made it to the front. We were never really concerned about our weight as we could travel with 30kgs each. Were more worried about getting everything to the check-in counter.

We started weighing in. We got up to 120 kgs and still had two bags to go!! We decided to take one 7kg box with us as hand luggage and the check-in lady very kindly let us go a little bit over our weight limit.

I am really not sure how this happened. We started the trip with under 70kg and that filled our car to capacity, I thought. Where did the other 60kgs come from and where did we put it!!

Well, we got in all on. Had a little hick-up when we scanned our hand luggage, as there was a big bottle of moisturiser in the box we decided to take as had luggage. Fortunately it was prescription moisturiser, and after doing some testing on it, we could take it.

The flight itself was great. It was just over 6 hours. By the time we landed none of us were over flying yet. I missed the last 10 minutes of my movie, so would happily have flow for longer.

In Abu Dhabi we waited a while in passport control, but by the time we got through all our bags and boxes were waiting for us. We trekked across the airport to the car rental place. Took a while to get that sorted but the car rental guys very kindly packed our load into our car. Managed to fit it all...yeah!!

We got quite spoilt with our lease car in Europe having Sat Nav. We didn't have a printer, so I wrote the google directions down, step-by-step. The first step said: 'Go East'. We left the carpark on the only road. We had no idea if we were going east as it was the middle of the night. The next step said: 'Slight left'. The road we were on just wet straight, with roads going of to the left only.

After going straight for about 8 kms we spotted a service station. We stopped to ask for directions. It felt very much like we were on the Amazing Race, driving in the dark, in a strange new country with no clue where we were going...

The KFC delivery guy gave us some directions, but we must've missed a step as we were driving towards more and more nothing-ness and no sight of the traffic lights we talked about. We took a few random turns and finally saw a sign to Yas Island. From there on it was plain sailing following signs and then looking for a big Raddison Hotel. (We figure that the directions were if you were leaving the hotel from the terminals, not the car rental side)

Our car was unloaded for us and then valet parked. Also had a porter taking everything up to the room for us...very nice.

We've got amazing views from our balcony. It's just a bit warm to stand there and enjoy them.