Plane Rides

On a typical Tuesday afternoon in Cincinnati Ohio...

My ride, Emily Craig's wonderful parents, pulled into the driveway around 12:35 on Tuesday June 16th--and of course, I was still not ready to go. So I stuffed my face with the wonderful and nutritious Ham and Cheese grilled sandwich my father made for me and through the final things together. Long story short...we were on our way to Dayton, OH. About halfway there I realized that I had forgotten my Australian money at home, so I was not off to a good start. As it turned out, there was a 5/3 atm at Dayton Airport and a nice lady at a currency exchange booth in Chicago O'Hare that saved the day. So crises averted.

We were lucky enough to have an Australian Flight Attendant on our flight from Dayton to Chicago. She was really cool and very jealous that we got to go and she had to fly to Seattle. We got a lot of stories and advice from her and I was feeling pretty pumped. We were pretty disappointed that not one of our other flight attendants from Chicago to LA or from LA to Sydney was an Aussie.

There was only one real speed bump on the road/airway to Sydney... DUE to the AMAZING (and please note the sarcasm) AMAZING weather in Chicago they were only using two runways and our captain notified us that he couldn't even see how many planes were ahead of us to take off. It turns out our plane was delayed about 1.5 hours and we were scheduled to land in LA around 10:10PM west coast time and by the time we taxied to the gate it was 10:30. This caused a problem because our flight to Sydney was expected to leave at 10:30. We were very lucky, apparently the Sydney airport doesn't allow planes to arrive before 6 AM and so our flight was delayed which gave us just enough time to meet up with our friends in LA and board our plane.

There were six (of the ten) of us on our flight out of LA. We had planned our seats so that there was a clump of us within a few rows. I was sitting next to my friend Jenna. The 14 hour flight seemed to fly by, we watched a few awful movies, had two meals and a snack that were actually pretty good, and tried to do some reading for school. The goal was to try and spread out the amount of time sleeping so that we weren't so jet-lagged the next day. As I said earlier the plane left at 10:30 LA time, which was 1:30 Ohio time, so we were already pretty tired from a day of traveling. We flew in over the harbor and landed at 6AM thursday, Sydney Time or 4PM Wednesday Ohio Time (getting the hang of this yet?). We were pretty delirious. We got off the plane, grabbed our checked luggage, made it through customs, and crammed into a large taxi-van to take us to our hostel, Billabong Gardens (google them to see pictures of where I'm staying)

sorry this post was so long and boring, I promise I'll get better.