A Sorta Recap (Part One)

This was our last view looking west over the Pacific Ocean as we came home from Australia. The sun was setting about four hours after we left Melbourne and wouldn't be up again until we were about 2-3 hours from Los Angeles. We breezed through customs and immigration...that was good.

We finally got out of Melbourne about 2pm Saturday afternoon, about two hours later than we were supposed to, which meant we had to hang out at the airport for about nine hours! Jonnene and I found an empty gate in the international terminal to hide out in where we laid out on the benches and got a few bits of shuteye. We had arrived about 5 am on the red-eye from Perth which we both agreed we'd never do again (this was my fifth time). From now on, if we go west-to-east across the country, we'll fly into the east coast the day before and spend the night. THEN fly out!

Early Saturday morning in Melbourne and I'm shooting pictures of wet airplanes.

Here's what I got...not too bad, huh?

It was raining in Melbourne when we arrived, reminding us of how it was raining when we arrived in Perth only 18 days before. It was just gray outside and we decided to forego a trip to downtown. We'd just get wet and we didn't need that before a 14-hour plane ride to the States. The Melbourne airport is pretty much barren at that early time of the morning but around 8-9 am it gets busy, with plenty of Asian travelers standing in these incredibly long buzzing lines that wind around the front area of the international terminal to the counters for the various Asian airlines that operate there. Now, there's plenty of other travelers, too, by that time but the Asian folks are the ones you can't help but notice. They're trying their best to carry everything they can onto the plane as carry-on luggage...which they can't. We saw one guy with a cart full of cardboard boxes of various sizes trying to wheel it through the doors into immigration and being told he had too much stuff (apparently, they like to buy lots of things when they travel). He'd have to find a way to reduce the load to a simple carry-on bag! Good luck!

Jonnene and I came into immigration carrying one full carry-on bag each. The guy weighing everything told her that her bag was about 3 kilos too heavy while mine was around 3 kilos under the limit. So he allowed us to switch items from hers to mine and in we went! The official was constantly turning away most of the Asians because their bags/boxes were just too much....lots of complaining going on but we kept walking. We found it funny that we had to switch stuff around in our bags but we were still carrying the same weight onto the plane.