7/21/01 - 10:45pm I write this aboard our Quantas flight to Sydney while waiting for our plane to push off from the gate. It is 10:42PST - that would be 1:42am EST on Sunday for you guys back home. Today has been a STRESSFUL on!! I awoke this morning to my mom nudging me to consciousness because my alarm clock rarely operates as it should. I rushed through a shower and a mediocre breakfast.
After a short pep-talk with Brian, we were off to PWM (Portland International Jetport). It was about two hours before we boarded the plane but just as we pushed off and the first engine ran up, there was a fault in our MD-88. It took them 15 minutes to finaly get the problem solved but I thought it was odd because Brian had said that there was going to be a mechanical failure of some sort. Well, to make a long story short about that, we took off 15 minutes late at 10:25am EST.
Shortly there after, we arrived at Ohio/Northern Kentucky Airport where we enjoyed a one hour layover. At some point we boarded the 757 that was supposed to take us to Los Angeles. The in-flight move was Heart Breakers with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sigorny Weaver. the lunch we were provided pretty much sucked. There was a choice of chicken or beef where I opted to take the beef choice that was served with southeast potatoes and string beans topped off with a mocha brownie, a caesar salad and some other stuff. Needless to say the meat wasn't cooked all that well which prompted me to ditch the meat and go for everything else. To make matters worse... the beef tasted exactly like both the green beans and the potatoes.
We finally arrived in LA after a very short flight, something like 3:45 hours. We gathered our luggage and headed to the bus which we thought was going to bring us to the hotel... this was far from the case. We ended up taking a bus tour of LA County and to top it off, we ate dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in Hollywood. We returned to LAX for check-in and waited for boarding our being 747-400 destined for Sydney, Australia.
I have somehow earned the pet name of OZ. They must have gotten it from my dog whose name is Oz. We waited and waited and finally we got on the gosh-darn plane. We ended up pushing back almost 20 minutes late and then spending another 10 minutes taxiing to our runway. THIS PLANE IS HUGE!
Right now we are about a half hour our of LAX with Heart Breakers as one of four in-flight movies. WE ALREADY SAW IT TODAY ahhhhhh... then there is the Tailor of Panama, Spy Kids, and one other. Oh well, dinner has arrived and I think I'm gonna catch some shut eye.
This post is part of James Connors travel journal for my People to People Student Ambassador Program trip to Australia in the summer of 2001. To see all of the posts, click on the Australia button at the top of the website.