TE 2009 – Day 1 (Aug 12)
Thursday, 3 September 2009Balikpapan, Indonesia
Tour Europe 2009 officially began with the taxi trip to Sepinggan Airport, Balikpapan, before catching a Rp 500k Mandala flight to Jakarta, where we took a shuttle bus from the new terminal 3 to the old terminal 2.
We had around 4 hours to kill in terminal 2 until Luftwaffe was scheduled to bring us to Frankfurt, Germany. And extremely fortunate for us, all members of the Gang were upgraded to C class for some unknown reason (perhaps overbooked plane), although we had only paid $935 for the ticket (Jakarta-Paris return).
Actually, at first everybody except me were upgraded, but the 3 others pointed out to Luftwaffe that I indeed also belonged to the Gang of Four, so Luftwaffe was kind enough to upgrade me as well… big thanks to Luftwaffe for their help in kick-starting Tour Europe 2009 in such a way!
The plane seemed to be quite full, but despite this, the flight went very well for us…