Y10 D24

Hello! Before I begin, let me make one thing perfectly clear - I had the time of my life in Australia. It was a whirlwind, exhausting, overwhelming, but it was also incredible, life changing, and one of the best experiences I could have ever hoped for in my life. The travel portion of it sometimes overshadowed the adventure, but I wouldn't trade the opportunity to have been there for anything.

Okay, here we go. Lots of time travel in this one kids, so stay with me. Got up 4am AEST. Left the hotel at 6am AEST. All this is Monday by the way. Traffic to the airport was hairy. They don't have a whole lot of lanes going into departures and man does it back up. I was stressing a little in the car. We got there about 6:30, found the ticket counter, and got our boarding passes. Went through the first layer of security and luckily the nice woman at the Quantas counter gave us express security passes. Don't know why, other than she liked us. No complaints. Made it through Aussie security in less than 10 minutes. We found our gate, found the lounge, and relaxed until boarding time. We boarded around 9, a little later than scheduled. We pretty much had the same seats home that we did there. Once again Quantas fed us like crazy. Lunch, mid flight snack, breakfast. About 15 hours later, we hit LAX. Or, 7am PST. On Monday. Yep. We landed two hours before we took off.

LAX was where the real headache started. Neither of us slept more than 2 hours on the long flight so we were cranky and tired already. We had to go through full customs as it was our first port of entry. First up was immigration check. That wasn't too bad, just lots of walking. Then we had to go through the bag portion and fuck the US. Four lanes of people merged into 2 lanes which then split back into three. Basically like an LA freeway. By this point it's 8:15 and we have to get to our gate by 9:55. We had to go from TBI to T6. A pretty damn good walk if you know LAX. If you don't, trust me, it's a haul, especially when you have bags.

We finally get to the Alaska counter to get new boarding passes and once again the fuckers force us to check our bags. I did get them to waive the charge at least but both of us were worried about shit breaking or being stolen. Not happy about that. Got through domestic security (yes, we had to go out of security) and found our new gate. We had a little time to stop in the board room and get a snack since they weren't going to feed us on this flight.

Finally land at PDX around 1:15. Sit in traffic after waiting for our bags, and stumble in the door at 2pm PST Monday. B crashed. I started doing stuff. Laundry, bills, unpacking, email, you name it. She woke up around 8:30pm and by then I had 90% of things done. I had moved past tired into over tired. We had a snack and then both of us made it to bed around midnight. As you can see from the time of this post, I slept hard.

Today I am taking it easy, doing email catch up, and getting my body reset. I have two days of training this week so it won't be too rough on me.

Would I go back? Yes. In coach? No. Business + 1st or not at all. It's too long a trip to suffer. But I would definitely visit the country again. See more of the countryside. I loved it there and hate being home.