The Adventure So Far

I'm writing this sitting in my living room at 5 AM on Monday morning, our third day here, because my body won't let me sleep anymore. Getting over this time change will probably take a few more days. I just can't stay awake long enough at night to reset my body. Kyle, Jacob and Sam are awake as well. The boys are eating breakfast and Kyle is getting ready for work. His carpool will pick him up at 6:45.

We left DFW just fine. Flying to Atlanta then back over Dallas made us roll our eyes, especially when the pilot announced when Dallas was below us. Whatever, Delta. I've heard horror stories about the Atlanta airport but after realizing our connecting flight to Los Angeles wasn't on the board and getting turned around only once, we made it to our gate with time to spare for some food. The plane from L.A. to Sydney was huge. It wasn't a double-decker but it had nine seats across in three rows. The kids sat in the middle and Kyle and I sat just to their left across the aisle. Let me tell you. That plane was definitely the way to go. The flight was long, yes, but each seat had a TV monitor and we had plenty of free TV shows and movies to watch. So with TV to watch, sleeping a lot, and being served two hot meals and a snack, the flight passed pleasantly enough. One exception was the three young men in front of Kyle and me who kept passing gas that could drop a horse. There was no way out. We were trapped.

We found out that any horror stories about any American airports are nothing to what you have to face in the Sydney airport. Talk about chaos. We had to pass through a checkpoint to have our carry on bags inspected where we discovered that Jacob's swiss army knife, that he got for Christmas, was nestled in a corner of his bag. DFW missed it but Sydney didn't and they are now the proud owners of Jacob's swiss army knife. We had to pass through another checkpoint and present our passports and then we could go to baggage claim to pick up our 7 bags of checked luggage and lug it through another checkpoint where they looked at the cards we had to fill out with our contact information, emergency contact information, (which by the way is you, Dad) and where we had to fill out any food we had brought with us into the country. You either have to throw the food away or get fined and face possible prosecution. For food?! No thank you. We threw it away as soon as we got off the plane. At the next checkpoint, we found out the food we brought didn't have to be thrown away. The kind of food they were looking for was things like fresh fruit and sandwiches and beef jerky. None of which we had brought in the first place. Then we had all our bags scanned and finally we could find our way to the right place to get our tickets for the flight down to Melbourne.

We caught a transport train and piled on with all our luggage. The train was pretty full and the five of us with our 7 bags of checked luggage and two carry-on bags each makes for quite a crew getting on an already full train. The train took off before Analee, Jacob and I had found something to hold on to and the momentum threw us into a couple of men standing behind us. I grabbed Analee and Jacob and braced myself against these two men (I really didn't have a choice), hoping I wouldn't fall down and take everyone with me. Once I regained my balance, all I could do was look at the two men and say, "I'm so sorry". They just laughed and so did a lot of other people, including my family. Thankfully, we got off at the next stop. The airline we were flying was Virgin Australia and once we found the desk we had about 15 minutes to get our luggage checked so it could make it on the plane. We had to unpack some items from two bags, one of them was mine, in order to meet weight requirements. In Dallas, we had to pay $200 for an overweight bag, (again, that bag was mine). Considering this entire trip is being paid for us, we could swing $200. In Sydney, that was not the case. You either get the bag down to weight or it just doesn't go, so our carry-on bags got heavier. We made it with two minutes to spare before our bags would not have been on the plane. We caught a bus over to the right terminal and had about 30 minutes to wait before boarding. Once landing in Sydney, everything up to this point had taken almost two hours. Sydney airport=crazy.

Landing in Melbourne and finding Kyle's coworker, Sheila Smith, with her husband, Jeff and their daughter, Hannah, was great. They drove both their car and ours so we had plenty of room for people and bags. We are driving a silver Toyota Camry. They took us home and we took a few hours to unpack and shower. Jeff and Sheila came back to get us and took us driving around, including the grocery store. Kyle drove and he did pretty well. By this time it was about 5:00 and we were all feeling wiped out. We had been told to try to stay awake until 8:00 but the kids lost the battle between 7:00-7:30. Kyle and I made it to 8:00 but it was hard. We slept until 7:00 the next morning, waking up a few times during the night, once with a terrible headache.

Sunday morning and our new ward began church at 10:00 and was only about 6 miles away so we left at 9:30 to give ourselves plenty of navigation time. I haven't been behind the wheel yet but having the wheel on the right side of the car makes me feel like my equalibrium has been thrown off. Anyway, we were making our way just fine and were sitting at a red light when we got rear-ended. It was actually the guy two cars behind us that hit the car directly behind us and pushed her into us. Her car was the only one that had any damage to it. No one was hurt but she was really shaken up. Taking care of that situation made us late for church and once we arrived, we found the parking lot gate closed and locked and the parking lot empty. Four other people were standing outside the gate and we found out they were from out-of-town also. Two were from California, here on business for two or three weeks. Using our handy-dandy smart phones, (Kyle has been given an iPhone by the company) we found out it was Stake Conference and the stake center was 20 minutes away. The stress of driving and barely making it to the building and the fact we didn't have a map to the stake center had us choosing to just go home. We went for a walk and found a farmer's market and park on the way to the beach. It was wonderful feeling the wind off the water and seeing so many big ships in the harbor. We picked up a lot of seashells and walked out onto the pier. In summer, it will be a wonderful, wonderful place to go. After walking home, we had lunch and played cards and found out our internet connection is unbelievably slow. We had dinner over at the Smith's with another coworker, Dan. It was really nice to have good food and be with good company. Once again, the boys fell asleep around 7:30, on the Smith's floor. We left about 8:30 and got everyone home with only a minimum of getting lost and we were all in bed by 9:30.

The plan today is to do laundry and find a library. There are four between our house and the beach. Sweet! I'm going to have to do a blog about "You know you're in Australia when..." There are some great fill-in-the-blanks.