Like Planemike my first long flight was in a Viking (as a ten-year-old in 1948 in my case). I have no memory of Blackbushe if that's where we started but we fuelled at Nice, night-stopped in Malta, fuelled at El Adem should have just fuelled at Wadi Halfa but had to night stop as Khartoum, where we should have stopped, had a sandstorm. We went there next day and then stopped at Nairobi and N'Dola before getting to Salisbury, which was were we got off, the aeroplane continuing to Jo'burg next day. Same flight crew throughout and I was invited to visit them at work a couple of times.
It didn't make me want to be a pilot, but did give me an interest in a career in aircraft design which started eight years later at de Havilland - appropriate since, a couple of years earlier, the first flight I had was in a Dragon Rapide from the Isle of Man to Liverpool