Finally, essentially half way through this trip, I'm able to write something for this blog. It makes me wonder why I even try to maintain a travel blog.
Anyway, I have a disincentive to post from my phone, like I am doing now, because the app freezes up any time I try to post a photo. I have a lot of good photos to share, but my loyal readers are stuck with text. The laptop is currently out of commission with a low charge. It's now charging in the bathroom, since there are only two accessible outlets in this hotel room.
I did attempt to publish a post Saturday at 9:10 pm, but my efforts were thwarted by the app glitch and exhaustion. Here is what I wrote Saturday:
Exhaustion
34 hours of travel to get here. 8.5 hours and 5.6 miles of walking later, I am absolutely exhausted and unable to write anything descriptive or meaningful for this blog. I will be asleep in minutes.
So, about the 34 hours of travel: we left Bloomington Thursday afternoon around 12:40 and met up with the rest of our students at the Indy airport. One student was late but connected with us just as the rest of us finished the rather slow check-in.
We had an uneventful flight to LAX, during which I got a little corps board work done. We had nearly a 5 hour layover in Los Angeles where I had a nice Mexican food dinner with my colleague Thao. I also bought new noise-canceling headphones for the trip.
Our next leg was a 15-hour flight to Sydney, on a fancy new-ish plane with just not quite enough leg room. This plane had nice huge windows with electronic shading rather than plastic blinds that slide up and down. As expected, it had a wide entertainment selection on seatback, touchscreen monitors. It had spiffy restrooms with motion sensor faucets - and there were ashtrays both inside and outside the restrooms. I was pretty confused by that, since I didn't think smoking was allowed in flight on any airline.
On the plane I watched The Greatest Showman, Call Me By Your Name (again - just as good as I remembered), and Ladybird. Well, I got through all of Ladybird except the last 9 minutes, so I'll have to look for that one on the flight back.
Customs in Sydney was a bit chaotic and confusing, because there was very little signage or instruction about what we were supposed to do. Once we got through the glitzy duty-free shops, we found the actual Customs agents. They were friendly and quick, and then we got to the baggage carousel where there was more chaos. Eventually we all found our bags and a nice woman pointed us in the right direction for the exit.
We had been told that we would drop our bags at a different location inside customs, then transfer to the new gate inside security and check in there for new boarding passes. That was not at all what happened. Instead, when we got to where I would have expected to re-check the bags, we ended up standing in line to wait for the k-9 to come around and check everyone for contraband. Once cleared, we exited the doors and found ourselves in the middle of the airport outside security. We followed the signs for domestic connections and actually ended up walking outside to another terminal to the Qantas check-in counter. Fortunately, the staff there was super helpful and they printed and distributed our boarding passes without even needing to see our passports. We dropped the bags there, went through security, and took a shuttle across the tarmac to another terminal before boarding our flight.
I had a nice chat with a young entrepreneur on the shuttle. He was inquisitive about our class, and had interesting insight into the energy sector and doing business in Asia. At the new terminal we discovered our flight was delayed, so we got coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts while we waited. Finally we boarded the hour and a half flight representing the final leg of our trip, and we arrived in Brisbane about 45 minutes late. Prof. Garcia and our host Ramintha met us at the airport and helped us find the bus to the hotel. We pulled up around 12:40 Saturday afternoon, our 34 hour trip complete.
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