Flying to Sydney

Our trip started at 4 a.m. on Saturday the 13th at Jose's apartment. Our first flight left at 6, so we had to be at the airport by 5 a.m. Jose dropped us off at the airport and we took our first plane to Denver, Colorado. In Denver, we boarded another plane that took us to L.A.

After arriving in LAX, we picked up our luggage and walked three buildings over to the terminal where Qantas is at. We checked in, went through security and grabbed some lunch. Since all the seats at Burger King were taken, we went to our gate and ate our lunch sitting in front of the 747. Man, those planes are huge!

Our seats were all the way at the back of the plane, but that was fine with us. There weren't many people on this flight, so we had a row of four seats to ourselves. I won't bore you with the flight to Sydney, but I will say that I read half of The Da Vinci Code, saw a couple of movies, a few T.V. shows and even slept a little.

Yes! We finally arrived in Sydney after 14 hours of flight. That was sure a long trip, but I'm sure it will be well worth it. So far, it has been. We went through customs and immigration without a problem. Next, we went to pick up our rental. It took us longer to get the rental car than to go through customs and immigration! Our rental is some ultra small Hiundai, we were barely able to fit all our luggage in it.

It took us a while to figure out how to get to our hotel, but we finally got on the road. I am sure glad Tim drove because I was weirded out with driving on the left side of the road. Two days later, and I don't think I'm used to it yet.

Our hotel was somewhere downtown, and it took us a while to find it. After finding it, we went in circles a few times trying to get it, but we couldn't find any street that would let us do a right turn. You can imagine that driving around on the wrong side of the road after a 14 hour flight isn't a very nice thing. So we were glad when we finally found a way to get to the hotel and got checked in.

Both Tim and I were ready to get to our room and just crash, but upon entering the room, we saw that they gave us one twin bed room instead of a two twin bed room. We waited a while for them to find us the correct room, but they finally told us they were all booked and didn't have any available rooms. So much for internet booking…

We decided to find a different hotel the next morning, but we weren't going to worry about that then. We were tired and wanted to go to sleep.