Russia Day 16 – Moscow to Birmingham

It was an early start – the earliest one of the trip. As our flight was at 06:05 we needed to be on the road by 03:00. The hotel did however provide a packed lunch for us to take with us for breakfast, though it was still quite an early one.

As is usual for Russian airports we had to have our bags x-rayed on entering the airport, and then after clearing passport control having hand luggage scanned a second time. The whole process wasn’t that slow as fortunately there weren’t many people about – it looked like they’d have struggled with the numbers we get through some UK international airports, though in fact they actually have several different ones depending on where your flight is going.

Whilst waiting for the gate to open for boarding I sat and had the breakfast I’d been provided with – croissant with a jar of jam and marmalade, an apple, and a ham and cheese sandwich. There was also a salmon sandwich, but not liking salmon I discarded it. To kill a little more time I also bought a Matroyshoka doll for 2800 roubles.

The plane to Frankfurt, the first of two flights, began boarding at 05:40 and only took 20 minutes before we left the gate. During the flight they served breakfast; I went for the waffles with morello cherries – an unusually good breakfast for a flight.

It took a while to get to the gate for my next flight once landed in Frankfurt – I had to take the monorail to a different set of gates and then go through security again. This time they got me to take my cameras out of my backpack and put them in their own tray, my laptop out of it’s case and in a different tray with my Kindle and iPhone, my backpack in another tray, and then the rest of my belongings in another. It seemed crazy! To make this take even longer they then did an explosives test on my backpack, though I guess with almost 4 hours to spare I did have time to waste.

At last though, I was ready for the flight home – the trans-Siberian adventure was over.