Wednesday, April 13, 2016

planes for yonks

moreton bay figs

We spent the first 4 days of our trip in Melbourne, once we finally arrived. Our original nonstop flight from LAX to Melbourne was cancelled, so we got stuck on flights from LAX to Sydney then to Melbourne. But I'm getting ahead of myself because the plane to get to LAX was delayed by six hours (sensing a theme?). This had me freaking out about our LAX connection and getting stuck in LAX for an ungodly amount of time waiting for the next Qantas flight. Thankfully, we found out that the plane from JFK was the same plane all the way to Sydney. Once I had that information, I was able to lean in to the delay (literally, because I couldn't sit for very long at a time without my tailbone protesting). We actually found out about our flight from JFK before we left the house. Being the neurotic that I am, I couldn't handle sitting around for that long, especially because I had visions of the flight getting moved to a less delayed time, which would have been disastrous had we been sitting at home "relaxing." So we left only about 45 minutes later than we had originally planned. Yes, Charrow deserves a medal for putting up with my lunacy.

Clearly my soothsayer skills need some work because our flight was most definitely NOT moved up, and we spent far too long sitting around the international terminal at JFK. So long, in fact, that I forgot we were still in New York because of all the foreign languages being spoken. On the bright side, we bought our body weight in the healthiest airport food we could find because we got $20 vouchers (each!) from the airline for the delay. The first of a long line of failures in our ability to maintain a small footprint during our T-Rex sized air travel footprint. So much plastic. And that brings me to the end of my ability to think straight for the day. Installment 2 of 347 tomorrow. Here's the short version with Australian lingo picked up from our friends (or should I say mates?):

we waited for yonks*
nearly driving ourselves spare**
where are the hoppies***?

*yonks = ages
** drive X spare = drive X crazy (X being your pronoun of choice)
*** hoppies = kangaroos (an obvious one)

picture: Moreton Bay Fig trees at Princes Park, Melbourne, AUS, March 2016, film, Leica M6 (they look remarkably like magnolia trees in person) 

1 comment:

Steve Reed said...

I am a firm believer in getting to the airport and waiting around there if necessary, as opposed to trying to stay home longer. Because you just never know.