My Aussie Adventures Begin

The flight to Dallas passed uneventfully. The pilot was definitely good at his job; both the landing and take-off were done smoothly. This was the smallest plane I’ve ever flown on. One seat, an aisle, and two more seats. Most carry on items were added to the baggage compartment because there was no room aboard. I couldn’t even stand up straight. Flying has changed since I last flew, two years ago. Now on short flight, such as this one, you get a complementary beverage, but if you want a snack you have to purchase it. No more free bags of peanuts.

We left late from Cincinnati so we arrived about fifteen minutes late in Dallas. Not that good for me since that left with me a half hour to catch my connecting flight. To my surprise the connecting flight’s gate number was not on the ticket. The pilot read off a list of them so I hoped that I’d heard him correctly. Luckily, the way to the SkyRail was clearly marked and I made it to the next terminal easily. The airport was huge! Walking would not have ended well. I made it to my gate along with a few fellow stragglers and boarded. A three seats, aisle, three seats plane.

We were delayed about 40 min because of the traffic on the runway, there were 10 planes waiting to take off before us! After what felt like forever, we were off. This pilot was really good too! I had the window seat so when darkness fell, the ground lights looked like stars and made beautiful patterns. At a cruising altitude of 360,000 ft I looked upwards out the window to see the actual stars. They were gorgeous, I could see so many. As we approached LA, I went from seeing occasional lights on the ground, clumps, to seeing one huge area lit up. Sadly I could not recognize any landmarks.

The airport was deserted at this hour except for our flight to Brisbane. I had to only walk two terminals further down, before finding myself a seat. This plane was huge! It had 75 rows of 3, 4, 3 seating with a partial second floor that included even more business class! I would highly recommend flying with Qantas at any chance you get (‘cept they only do Australian flights…so you’d have to be going to Australia). They’re now my new favorite airline, sorry Lufthansa, you got bumped.

To begin with, everyone had their own individual monitor, you could pick from tons of different shows and movies like CSI, Mentalist, How I Met Your Mother, Good Wife, and every newish movie including Avatar or play games. I ended up watching Valentine’s Day at the very end. They handed out these amazing menus letting you know that you could ask for snacks anytime that you were hungry. And by snack, you could even request fresh fruit. They had separate vegetarian trays for people, and even offered a hot breakfast (never had that happen). The food was pretty good, I liked it a lot. After dinner, they handed everyone a little snack bag with water, cookies, trail mix, and M&Ms. Also every passenger got not just a blanket, headphones and pillow (which by the way, was a fantastic pillow. It actually had a cover on it and was rather hard instead of being this soft polyester ball), but also a little kit that had a sleeping mask, and toothbrush.

I had an empty seat next to me so I could stretch out a bit, thank goodness. This flight part was 14 hours long. After eating, I must have spent about seven hours drifting in and out of sleep since the next time I checked the time left till destination, only 4 hours were left. I ate breakfast, watched a movie, plus some tv, listened to music, and then it was time to land. Another good flight! Some turbulence, but nothing major. So I only took Dramamine for at the beginning and it wears off, I must be over flight motion sickness!

I’ve missing flying so much. There’s nothing like the feeling of taking off and landing in a plane, watching the ground fly by. I filled out my yellow customs form on the plane and headed to passport control. We had to walk a long distance to get there, the airport was deserted save for those from my flight. I kept staring out of the window. The trees and foliage looked so different. There were palm trees! Made it through easily to baggage claim. That took awhile. My bags finally showed up, right in a row to, so I was scrambling to grab the heavy things off the belt. At least they didn’t go missing with all the transfer flights! Next stop, customs. I put my baggage through an x-ray machine, and apparently there was something suspicious about my blue suitcase, he thought it was some type of medicine. The only thing I had with me was tums though. The customs guy was really friendly and nice though (a bonus of looking young and travelling alone, airport officials are always nicer). I opened it up for him, and he looked through carefully, not to mess up my stuff. Apparently it was my contacts that he couldn’t identify. Huh.