Traveling - my take

Sorry this is a couple of days late. Just wanted to put up my take on the trip over here. I think Carly agrees with a couple of things after having a couple days to reflect on the trip.

Whew, glad that’s over with! 35 hours of travel will wear a body down. We have arrived safe and sound in Melbourne (pronounced Mel-bin by locals). All of our luggage made it through from Vancouver just fine thankfully. It took a while for ours to come out onto the carousel and when I saw my suitcase I shouted “woohoo at least I have pants and underwear!” Everything else came out fairly quickly though. Customs wasn’t bad, there was a drug sniffing dog checking everyone out as they got off of the plane in Melbourne. We weren’t allowed to keep any of our beef jerky or slim jims that we had in the junk food bag but that was the only problem with anything. I did get searched when we got back on the plane going from Sydney to Melbourne, the security guys were all pretty impressed with my shoes because they have a dial on the back that tightens the steel laces so there is no tying involved.
We flew on a 747 which was pretty huge, we were in seats 39 J and K. I tried to figure out how they got to K before the flight because there are 10 seats per row, 3 on each side and 4 in the middle, and if you say the letters in order you should end up at J. Turns out they skip “I”, this is to limit confusion I suppose. First class and business class both looked pretty darn nice. Their seats reclined completely flat into beds. They also had an individual TV screen that was fairly large whereas we had several throughout the economy cabin to share. I’m guessing they had better food too.
We had 2 meals on the flight if you want to call them that. The first was dinner which was a choice of beef or chicken (neither looked or tasted as advertised) with a side of vegetables, a roll, and a “brownie”. Then we had a snack a few hours later which was something they tried to pass off as turkey on a hard stale egg roll with some form of manmade “cheese product” on top. I took two bites and went back to sleep. Last, at about 4 am Melbourne time, was breakfast which was either scrambled eggs or french toast, we both went with the toast thinking they couldn’t mess it up but were sadly mistaken when we found that the bottom piece was blackened and stuck to the plastic tray.
After our flight we took a taxi to the hostel we booked and after checking in and making a couple quick calls to let everyone know we made it all right we headed straight for the showers. I’m sure we were pretty off-putting to anyone who wasn’t on our flight as was evidenced by the fact that both of the people we video chatted with back home said I looked exhausted about five seconds into the conversation. There has been a drought going on here for something like 7 years now so they have buckets in the showers and ask you to collect excess water in them for the plants outside. Makes you appreciate the Great Lakes a lot more.
After getting cleaned up we headed downtown to check out what’s going on in Melbourne’s CBD. We took the tram and just got off where we thought was good and started wandering. It’s going to take some time to get used to seeing cars driving on the left side of the road and the driver’s side being on the right. I saw a car go past me and at first it looked like a dog was driving until I remembered where I was. Carly had the same reaction to a 4 year old sitting on the left side of a passing car. We checked out Federation Square and the Queen Victoria Market which was closing at the time but looked like it would be a cool place to shop for produce and who knows what else.
In case you’re wondering what the time difference is, its 14 hours ahead of Eastern and 17 ahead of Pacific. Its 7:15pm here and its 5:15am in Michigan. So best times to call us are from 7pm- whenever at night or whenever you get up in the morning until 9am, that’s 11pm here. Who knows what’s next!