Our flight from MUC brought us to terminal 5 in LHR about 45 minutes later than scheduled. From there a bus would take us to terminal 3 and a chance to go through security one more time. After passing through the metal detectors I found that my carryon bag had been set aside for a secondary inspection. Oddly enough, somewhere along the way I had accumulated a zip lock back of makeup. My guess is that this might have happened when we were at the lounge in MUC. I couldn't get the lock on the locker to work and just figured it was safe enough to not worry about something being stolen. As it turns out, I should have also been concerned about the fact that our two black rollaboards look much like everyone else's. I'd say that the total time from stepping off the plane to reaching airside of terminal 3 was a good 90 minutes, with the secondary luggage inspection probably adding about 10-15 minutes itself. That left me with about 2 hrs to explore.
Once in terminal 3 proper we made our way to a few lounges. Based on my Oneworld emerald status, we had entry into several lounges including Qantas, Cathay Pacific and a British Airways lounge. I tried the Centurion lounge as well, but there was a 20 minute queue, and since I would have just been popping in there just to take a few snaps, I decided to give it a pass.
The Qantas lounge was the first one I spotted that was also appealing.
Once through to the lounge, we made our way to the second floor with its circular bar. I had built up fairly high expectations for salt and pepper squid and gin and tonics that would be on offer. Unfortunately, by the time I had reached the lounge there would be no ala carte service and hence I'll need to wait a bit longer to try the squid.
I consoled myself with a gin and tonic at the downstairs bar which features a couple dozen different gins on offer. What would I choose? Definitely not the Aviation gin!
After considering my options, I went with the Masons of Yorkshire ...
And some cheesecake.
I would do the same thing all over again.