So anyone who knows my dad knows that patience is not his strong suit. His favorite proverb is "Punctuality is a virtue." We have all told him 8 million times that he has it wrong, and it is "Patience is a virtue" but we can rarely finish the sentence before he is out the door. So Jake and I knew that 32 straight hours of travel together was going to be painful at best. It started off surprisingly well. We had a 6 hour layover in LA, but we found a bar with a hockey game on. Score! Hockey on tv = happy dad. We boarded the plane around 10pm Wednesday Cali time and geared up for the 15 hour flight. Then we sat on the plane for 2 hours before we took off because of some computer issues. That was the worst!! I can't sleep on planes - ever - so I had 3 glasses of wine and took a valium (don't judge me). I expected all that could knock out a horse, but I was still wide awake. I don't know what it is about me and airplanes because if I have 3 glasses of wine at home I'm passed out in about 3 seconds. And I took a valium on top of that!!! Thankfully I am short and relatively bendy (thanks Northshore Yoga) so I curled up in my seat and watched 5 movies. Oh- and I now think Inglorious Bastards should have won the Oscar.
So after 15 long, miserable hours we landed in Sidney at 10am Friday. So essentially, Thursday the 11th didn't exist for us. This fact greatly bothered my friend Ashley Doherty (shout out!) but we get to live April 3rd twice on the way home, so it's all good. From Sidney we caught a 3 hour flight to Cairns, where will we spend the next 3 nights. It is beautiful here!! Oceans and mountains and sun! We got to the hotel around 4pm, finally got to shower, and met up with our travel group for drinks and dinner. We are with a group called Go Ahead Tours. Our tour guide is a cool chick named Erica. There are 32 travelers in the group. Jake and I were expecting to be the youngest ones by a good 30 years or so since most employers wouldn't let people take a month off to go bounce around the world. But since a boss is something the both of us are currently lacking, no biggie for us! So we were right about being the youngest - with the exception for a family of 5 with school age kids. Nobody has asked them how they are swinging that one...
At dinner we met our new BFF's - Paul and Edna from San Diego. They rock! We finished dinner around 7 and everybody was ready to crash. I had only slept about 3 hours on the plane, so I should have been in pass out mode, but Jake and I were both ready to go out. We wanted to stay up as late as possible so we wouldn't be awake at 4 am (like Dad was). So we went to a local bar for some beers. We should have had liquor drinks instead since they are cheaper than beer. Seriously. Liquor is about $2 cheaper than beer here. It is the weirdest thing. Beers here cost around $8 or $9 and a vodka tonic will run you about $7. WTF Mate? We asked a local and were told that the government puts a HUGE "sin tax" on alcohol. I guess the Australian government thinks that beer is a bigger sin than jager bombs. So since we needed the Red Bull, we had some of those....
So we managed to make it out until almost 11pm and slept til 8 this morning! Let the vacation begin!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment