We left Seattle on Friday, September 25th, for an adventure of a lifetime to the exotic continent of Australia.

We both left work a little early and I took the bus to the airport while Troy took light rail and then transferred to a shuttle to the airport, since light rail doesn't go all the way to the airport yet. We got to the airport in plenty of time and had to check in with an agent, instead of going to one of the self-service check-in computers, since it was for an international flight. We ate mediocre overpriced airport food for dinner.

We took off from Sea-Tac Airport around 7:20pm and arrived in Los Angeles around 9:45. LAX was a little stressful because it wasn't very clear where we were supposed to go for international flights. There were no signs telling us that we had to exit the building and walk to the other terminal. I guess it would make sense for us to do that now that I think about it, but at the time it was confusing and we were in a hurry.

We eventually found our way to the security area for our international flight and waited in a long line. Once we got to our very crowded Qantas gate, we still had probably 30 minutes to spare. I could see the gigantic 747 out the window, it looked enormous. We finally boarded around midnight and settled in for a 15 hour flight to Melbourne. The plane had two aisles, with 3 seats on each side and 4 in the middle. We had two seats on the right side of the middle section, so I only had to get up whenever Troy needed to get up. No one else had to climb over us or wake us up, which was nice.

Qantas is probably the best airline I've ever flown with. Each seat has it's own 6" tv screen and they actually had a decent selection of current movies, older movies, tv shows, documentaries, and music to choose from. They also have a flight path tracker that I could look at whenever I wanted to see where exactly we were over the Pacific Ocean. It told me how long we'd been in the air, how many miles we'd traveled, how much farther we had to go, and the temperature outside, which was as low as 50 below zero.

Qantas served us two meals, with several snacks and drinks in between. We had dinner after about an hour in the air and it came with our choice of beverage, including free wine, so I had the white and Troy had red. We were so tired by then, after having woken up at 6:30am Friday morning for work, that we went almost directly to sleep.

They gave us a "comfort kit" which included a small toothbrush, a small bottle of toothpaste, a sleep mask, and a pair of socks. We slept fairly well on the way over, for about 7 hours. I woke up with about 4.5 hours remaining, so I watched some episodes of Family Guy and then we had breakfast. The flight actually seemed to go by fairly quickly. We landed in Melbourne at 8:00am on Sunday, September 27, after flying over 9,000 miles from Seattle.

The only hiccup we had was that our luggage didn't make it with us to Melbourne. It was held up in Los Angeles because the Alaska Airlines and Qantas people apparently don't communicate that well and our luggage was put on the next flight to Sydney and was then flown to Melbourne. Thankfully we didn't have to go back to the airport to get it, Qantas delivered it around 11:30pm that night, which was nice. Yay for Qantas and yay for finally being in Melbourne to see Adam & Sofia!