Our Journey

We all met at the Ft. Wayne aiport at 2:00 pm EST. We were bumped to an earlier flight, but because of weather conditions, we did not leave for Chicago until 3:52 pm, 22 minutes behind schedule of our original flight. We landed in Chicago about an hour later. The flight from Ft. Wayne was the worst flight of my life. We were on a smaller commuter flight where you could feel every bump. I feel extremely fortunate to live close enough to O'Hare and Midway for every flight I need to make.

After everyone waited for me to get over my aisickness once we landed, we found out that because of the weather, our flight out of Chicago would not leave early enough to make our L.A. connection to Sydney. Kay called the RI travel service, and somehow the five of us were able to get on a 5:30 flight to LAX.

The most exciting thing about out flight to L.A. was that Seal and Heidi Klum were in first class!

Once in L.A., we had some food and walked around some of the shops. We had three hours to kill until our 11:00 PST flight to Sydney.

The flight to Australia wasn't as bad as I expected. Yes, my legs were sore by the end of the flight, but the nightime asprin helped me sleep on and off for some of the it, and of course, I had plenty of reading material with me. The flight was very smooth, and, fortunately, there were hardly any small children who made a lot of noise.

We arrived in Sydney, and somehow United managed to get our luggage onto our flight even though we got reassigned at the very last minute. Well, except for Steve's. It will hopefully get delivered to him today. Immigrationa and customs went smoothly, and we caught our connection to Canberra.

Our hosts from the Jerrabomberra met as at the airport. I am staying with Cathy and Colin Hobbs. Cathy was a member of a GSE team from Canada/ Michigan in 2001 that visited District 9710. She met Colin here, and they've been married for three years. They both knew how exhausted I was, so they kept me busy all day. We visited Mt. Ainslie and the Telestra Tower, had lunch in Kingston (an area with all kinds of shops and eateries, a lot like Evanston), went to an open market to get food for dinner, and took a long walk around Jerra. Cathy and Colin made an excellent dinner of marinated prawns, tuna, and asparagus. After I made it to 8:00 pm, I was pronounced allowed to pass out. I woke up a few times during the night, but didn't really wake up until 9:00 am this morning.

Today, I have spent uploading some pictures and catching up on some e-mails. Somehow, I cannot post pictures to the blog, but if you go to the Flickr site on our links, you can see some of the pictures I uploaded, including the one I took of the back of Seal's head.

Purdue beat Iowa, and Illinois plays Michigan tonight. Greg e-mailed me from Lot D, and I hope all our friends had a good time celebrating the Boilers' first victory after a two-game losing streak.

I wanted to tell George at work that they have goodwill stores here! Tim and Leah, the toilets so far have just flushed straight down. They haven't swirled, so I can't tell if they go the opposite way. And I had my first taste of Vegemite, and it is VILE!

Tonight we're going to a BBQ. More posts and pictures to follow.