Going to Oz...Arriving in Oz

Holy Ka-moley, we're in Australia! Finally hooked up to the internet and spending our first full day in Perth. Jonnene's already gotten a massage from her old masseuse, Steve (yeah, I let some other guy put his hands ALL over her! Anything to make her happy, y'know?), while I walked around the shops in downtown Perth. We met up with her brother and sister for lunch, and now I'm back writing up a few things for this blog. I think I'll show some photos with captions instead of a long boring write-up that goes on forever.


On our way from Houston to Los Angeles...this is somewhere over California as the sun was setting on Saturday. We left out of Alexandria, LA with a transfer in Houston. We had to spend about six hours at LAX before our flight to Melbourne but we had to deal with using a bus to get to our Qantas 747 from the international terminal. The terminal is undergoing renovations and there's a limited number of gates available at this time. So all 250+ passengers on our flight had to board buses...two buses at a time...out to a converted maintenance building where we walked up ramps to board the plane. Jonnene wasn't impressed.

We sat on the right side of row 52 with a young lady from South Carolina, Alisa, who is going to a arts and sciences college to become a fashion designer. Our flight over the Pacific lasted over 14 hours and had to take a more southerly track to avoid some bad weather sitting east of Australia. As it turned out, the weather was not as bad as the pilots had been told so we took the route for nothing but I guess it's better to be safe than sorry. Generally, the flight was pretty good...I slept great compared to other trans-ocean trips, saw three movies, and didn't accomplish any of the little projects I had in mind while we were in the air.

This is the inside of our 747 during our flight over the Pacific, somewhere about 8 hours into the trip. You can see some of the video monitors located on the back of the seats so passengers can watch movies, TV, documentories, and other stuff....good ways to waste time and forget to get some sleep. You take off around midnight, eat dinner about two hours later, and somehow we're all still awake. You almost have to force yourself to sleep (well, some of us) and you HAVE to sleep if you have any hope to feel like a normal human being when you land in Oz.

Jonnene walks with friends Pam and Gary along the Yarra River in Melbourne. We landed in Melbourne about 10 am local time, got through immigration and picked up our bags (no problems at all with customs), cleaned up a bit, and headed downtown to mail a birthday card to my nephew, get my customary Farmer's Union ice coffee at a 7-11 near Bourke Street, and meet up with some old friends of Jonnene's for lunch on the South Bank. It was nice to relax after all the travel.

One of the many seagulls you'll find along the Yarra River as you walk along the South Bank of Melbourne. The sea is not that far away and the harbor area is even closer.

All told, our total actual flying time was 22 hours, 19 minutes. We also kept the total time we spent traveling from the time our first plane taxied to the runway in Alexandria to arriving at the gate in Perth...we're talking a total trip time of 40 hours, 56 minutes!! Yeah, we kept track of that. All true.