As we had an early flight out of Melbourne on Monday, we left Bendigo Sunday afternoon and stayed at the Park Royal at the airport, getting a few hours sleep with a wake up call at 2:30am, over to the airport and in line to lodge our baggage, and looking at the line up of people this was going to be a full plane load, on to customs and that has all changed, now fully automated, until you come to scanning your hand luggage, that is still a manual process, finally through and then into Duty Free, a quick look around, Nah!!! didn't want anything and then went looking for my morning coffee, damm no coffee outlet open at 4am

Finally after a small delay we started boarding around 5ish and then on our way and a long 14 hours trip non stop was ahead of us, the last few hours just never seemed to end and I have lost count of the amount of movies I watched

Arrived in Dubai 1:30 (would have been about 8pm Vic time) straight onto customs and that was quick considering the time of day, our luggage was already going round the carasoul and then to find the shuttle bus

We are staying at the Millennium Hotel which is only a few kilometres from the airport and as we are only here for 24 hours and had no desire to rush around and sightsee this is the perfect place to stay for a stopover, the hotel is very clean and we were upgraded to a deluxe suite which consists of an enormous seperate lounge and dining room, a big bedroom, two king twin beds, big bathroom seperate bath and shower plus two seperate toilets?

Woke up this morning to a beautiful red sun as only Dubai can do and unbelievably the weather is perfect, not that horrible clinging heat we had the last time we were here, in fact the breeze was quite cool.

We leave Dubai today around 12:00 and then fly to Milan.