Say goodbye to your luggage at the first airport as you leave and with any luck the next time you see it will be in your cabin on board the ship. Remember that if you don't have any luck and they lose all your luggage you can just use your "Jane's Perspective" of buying all new clothes as souvenirs.
My husband and I boarded our first flight together and flew to Charlotte with a window seat. I soon found out that window seats make me dizzy and switched places with my husband. I was still able to enjoy taking a peak every now and then at the beautiful clouds that we were flying over.
With a layover in Charlotte before we boarded our international flight, we ate a sandwich not knowing that we would be fed supper, snacks, drinks (including alcohol) and breakfast on our next plane. Oh well, it never hurts to be overfed (that's a "Jane's Perspective" that I'm sure is not a healthy perspective.)
We sat in the middle of the plane in what my husband calls a 4 and 2. In other words there were two seats together on each side of the plane by the windows and 4 seats together in the center of the plane with isles on either side. I guess I was just being idealistic when I figured that since an international flight takes so long, that there would be more room to spread out. Wrong! There's very little leg room and when everyone reclines their seats for more comfort it's near impossible not to pull someone's hair when you grab the seat in front for leverage to get out to go potty. I've heard that if you plead you can get the seats behind the wall that separates 1st class. They have lots of leg room. But if you don't get those seats, if you really need to stretch your legs try sitting in the isle seat. You can't keep your feet there all the time but you can stretch every now and then and it's much easier to get up from those seats.
The best part about the flight other than the food (it was actually pretty good and I had so much food that I even stuffed some packages of peanuts and cheese and crackers in my purse for later) was the fact that each person had their own individual tv set. You could watch tv shows or first run movies or play games or watch the weather and a neat little map that showed you where you were in the flight. My husband watched that most of the time. We tried to watch a movie together but I couldn't get my movie to start at the same time. He was always 10 minutes ahead of me and I kept getting glimpses of what was going to happen next.
The flight was abou 10 hours long so to decrease the effects of jet lag they recommend that you get some sleep and drink plenty of water. Please do if you can. I sort of dosed off in between movies but my husband stayed awake the whole time much to his disappointment when it took him three days versus my one day to get over the jet lag. They even turn the lights off in the plane and give you pillows and blankets to encourage sleep.
So the flight was pretty nice considering how tired you can get from sitting up for 10 hours but when we arrived in Munich, things literally got "all shook up".
