The trip begins

After many months of planning, and many dollars later (more than I know how to express), we finally got to our early morning departure. 

Getting up at 3:45am, we bundled ourselves into the car and set off on our trip of a lifetime. 

Tracy’s parents had offered to drive down to the airport and meet us there at the incredibly early time of 5am so they could take our car home, saving us the very expensive alternate option of leaving it in the sun baked car park for a month. 

6:05 am arrived and we were in the air. We were facing the huge 55 minute flight to Melbourne as our 1st leg. If only all  our flights were to be that easy. We got a nice little feed of something resembling muesli with a separate pack of cranberries. One of the few airline foods that didn’t look like it had been on 3 flights already. 

Customs screening in Melbourne was way easier than I ever imagined. I almost got the feeling they were happy for me to leave the country. 

After a few hours of waiting, the not so easy 14.5 hour flight to LA was underway. 

I hereby let it be known, I will NEVER enjoy sitting in the middle of 3 seats for that length of time EVER again. 

Luckily Kayla was on my left giving me someone to pester and tell me off for talking to myself, with some middle aged female sitting to my right grumbling every time I spoke to myself or when I woke her up so I could go to the amenities. Speaking of which, the inwards opening door of those smelly little places in the plane does not understand the acrobatic manoeuvres that this not so flexible body needs to perform just to get in and lock the door. Never mind the art of hitting that floating ping pong ball I kept imagining was in the bowl that my knees were not so gracefully leaning on. 

After what seemed to be an eternity, and with about 40 minutes sleep in total, we arrived in LA. The land of people that need to get everywhere fast with complete disregard for whoever they bowl over in the process of trying to get there. Nearly 90 minutes after landing, we were almost through customs. It makes total sense to have about 1000 passengers off 3-4 international flights trying to get through about 20 customs officers. I mean why would you want to put extra staff on when you can make tired grumpy passengers who haven’t slept for 24 hours wait in a line for even longer, soaking up the aroma of all those sweaty armpits and bad breath. Makes total sense to me. 

The only funny part to the arrival was that my Aunty Colleen and Uncle Bob from sunny Queensland met us in the arrivals hall. That’s also a 15 hour flight away and they just happened to be departing LA today after visiting my cousin Ray (their son) and his family. The uncanny timing of their trip and ours gave us all something funny to talk about and discuss just how small this enormous world is. 

Next step is to pick up our hire car. But that is also the next blog entry.