Eek!  That 4:30a wake-up call is brutal, but going to bed early helped. Let the day begin: 1 hour on the treadmill, breakfast at hotel (crappy bagel), car dropped and in the airport lounge with 1 hour 15 minutes till boarding.  Good morning sunshine!

Our first flight is to Toronto, odd routing, but it works.  Plus we booked 1st class ages ago, so it was cheap….and the reason we kept the flights and the trip, even after the cruise we originally planned was canceled.  Boarding was delayed due to luggage – the entire Zimbabwe rugby team is aboard.  Jeez they are big. And boy do they have luggage!   Once aboard, the flight was further delayed to finish loading the checked gear.  Crazy.  Oh, and one guy brought a full size speaker as a carry on – which did not go over well with the flight attendants who had to stuff it into the first class closet.  But hey, boys will be boys, let the party begin!🏉🙄🤣

We finally take off – no problem for us, the longer we sat on the tarmac, the less time we have in Toronto, which originally began as a 5+ hour layover.  We’re good.  The flight is easy – weather beautiful – and bonus!  We can see Niagara falls from the air. Seriously I had no idea it would look like that – surrounding by all the buildings and high-rises.  I just assumed it would be out in nature.  At least now I can say I’ve seen the falls – and not have to bother actually visiting them! 

Now onto the layover.  Which actually wasn’t all that bad.  Security was easy and fast, we were in the lounge easily with only 3 hours until our overnight flight to Zurich.  Not too bad.

Once again, we are in Business for the overnight flight, with lovely lie flat seats so we can at least try to get some sleep before arriving extremely early in Zurich and catching our connecting flight to Berlin.  Great seats, nice menu (where we choose if we want to be awakened for breakfast) and a lovely little boarding snack of nuts and champagne.

All wonderful until we spy the little child in the first row of Business.  So cute, so small, such an ear-piercing way of happily screaming. Oh no.  Please don’t even go there….

The flight progresses well enough, excellent food from starters to mains – I actually have the beef which is huge and fabulous, Ed had the chicken, equally good.  After drinks – good beer choices! – and dessert, we both nestle into our lie flat seats and….the monster begins.  To say the child screamed the entire way across the Atlantic might be a stretch.  Well, not that much of a stretch.  The monster effectively kept the entire Business cabin awake and on edge the entire flight.  At one point in time when we had actually managed to fall asleep for just a few precious minutes, it started again and both I and the gentleman on the aisle seat sat up, tore off our headphones (which we were all using to try to dampen the sound) and showed our displeasure to with raised hands and some disgruntled “really’s”?  To which said monster’s mother replies, “we’re doing the best we can.”  Um, no, the best you could would be to leave the monster at home while you traveled – or better still, waited until the monster could fly companionably and not totally annoy everyone on the plane.  Huge sigh.

And so went the rest of our flight – short power naps broken by high pitched screams.  To say we were rested when we arrived in Zurich, well, that would be terribly misleading.  We were finally released from monster-hell and made our way to Passport control in Zurich, and of course, what do we see? The monster, now sound asleep in daddy’s arms.  I so wanted to go pinch that child and wake it up to make it scream for everyone for the rest of the day.  Sorry.  Not sorry.