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G'day mate! Sorry about the delay, but as most of you guessed; I
am in the Land Down Under! I love Australia and I'm
excited to be back. It's going to take a few newsletters to show
you around Sydney and where I am now. Speaking of where I am right
now: I'm in a remote place in Australia where they do not have high speed
internet access and to get on a slow dial up cost $1.20 a minute. Ouch!
Therefore most of my pictures, stories, links and tips about
Sydney
will have to wait till next week. To give you a little hint where
I am now... I'm on the balcony of our hotel, overlooking a few of
the surrounding 74 tropical islands. The temperature is 28
degrees Celsius (I have no idea what that is in Fahrenheit, but it's
HOT!) There are wild cockatoo's, colorful lorikeet's and big
ole' bats flying around the lush green palm trees. Any ideas where
I am? I'll tell you in due time, right now let me first tell you
about our last minute journey that got us to the land they call down under.
We pulled this
7,490 mile
journey off at the very last minute. It all came about,
about a week ago when I emailed my brother, Frank, and wrote in
the subject line: "We fly, you buy". He knew what I
meant, "we get first class tickets and he pays the rest of the way".
Not a bad deal because who wants to sit in coach for 14 hours or pay
$14,500. I was planning on cashing in a bunch of miles because
I'm starting to get a bit worried about my “mileage” account, but since
they were only willing to give us one first class seat, Amber Airplane
suggested we use her very limited and coveted "buddy passes".
A buddy pass is a stand by ticket. Meaning, if there are seats
available, they are ours. It's a long and complicated process,
but basically it's based on seniority. Unfortunately her airline
just recently raised the prices significantly, the only good thing about
that is not that many people are flying on buddy passes these days.
These passes are a great deal especially if you can be flexible because
you never know for sure if you are going to get on. This was an experience
for me, as I have not used them very often, especially overseas.
Frank, as usual never confirmed with us if he was going
to accept our offer. He went M.I.A. the whole weekend, so I
couldn't get a hold of him. Because of his non-committal, I
didn't make reservations or definite plans. Everyone thought
I was a little wacky when I said "I might be going to Australia tomorrow",
but if they knew my brother or were familiar with buddy passes they would
understand. Tuesday morning rolls around and Frank wakes me at
6:30am to say that he is on his way. On his way to: where? Well to the
airport of course, to JFK to come meet us in L.A. I spent most of
the day trying to finish up some last minute work and I monitored to see
if the flight we were planning on taking looked good or not for stand
by travel. Frank arrived and was bummed when I told him the flight
didn’t look too good for tonight. We decided to make plans to leave
the following day, which meant I would put all my errands off for 24
hours. When we were just about to go out the door to dinner, I get
a phone call at 8pm from a friend of Amber Airplane’s. Her friend
worked at LAX and said, “You should try to fly out tonight because it's
your best chance to leave this week". It's 8pm and neither Amber
Airplane nor I had packed. You should've seen Amber Airplane's face
when I said "we needed to leave in 15 minutes to go to LAX".
It takes me 5 minutes to pack, Amber, well she is a perfectionist so
it takes her a while. We run around the house like a tornado, send
a couple of quick emails, call a taxi, and do all the normal going away
stuff like locking up the house (which we forgot to do). The taxi
driver was 15 minutes late, and when we got close to LAX someone yells
out, "Oh my gosh, I forgot my passport at home" (I'm not mentioning
any names, but I think you know who). We tell the taxi to make a
quick U-ey, which sends us flying into each other, puts a big smile on
the driver's face because not only does he make more money, but he gets
to listen to more of Frankie D's taxi cab confessions…
We show up to LAX at 9:15pm for a 10:10pm international
departure. The agent, who happened to know me, just gave me a look
like "What are you thinking?” I shrugged my shoulders and shifted
my eyes to: you know who and he smiled. Then he wasn't too happy
when he found out we didn't apply for an
electronic visa
, so he had to do it, which added another 3
minutes, per passenger! Our buddy said "First class actually
looks good, but there are only 3 seats left and if they call our name
and we’re not at the gate, we lose them". Obviously, we did not want
to fly coach, who does? The plane was already boarding, and they
were about to call stand byes any minute. The one positive thing
about showing up to LAX late is there was no security line. The negative;
we had to run all the way through the terminal like a pack of hyena's.
Yelling to each other, FASTER, FASTER! As we approached the gate
we heard our names being called over the PA and we made it just in the
knick of time to pick up our seats
1A, 1J
, and 2J!
First Class
Baby! We felt like dancing but we were out of breath, had sweat
pouring down our heads, and had one more stop; passport control.
We cleared there and then hopped (umm, skipped) on to the plush 747-400
where we were immediately greeted by the coolest captain. He put
Mardi Gras beads around our necks and said welcome aboard. It was
my first time sitting down stairs in the very first seat of a 747.
We were literally in the nose of the plane (the cockpit is upstairs).
We get to our seats. Sit back, take a peek at our amenity bag (socks,
eye patch, ear plugs, tooth brush, lip balm etc.), have a cold glass of
water served in a glass, and take a deep sigh.
A few minutes later the purser gets on the PA and says tonight’s flight
time is 15 hours and 58 minutes. Amber and Frank both look
at me and said "you told me it's 14 hours". I said "it always
has been, must be a strong head winds, I don’t know, but at least we
are in first". They all agreed. The captain becomes even
more popular when he gets on the PA and alleviates all the passengers when
he corrects the flight attendant. He says tonight’s flight time
is only 13 hours and 58 minutes. What a great way to make a long
flight, look short in a matter of minutes.
When you fly to Australia from the States, you lose a
day. Which means we took off at 10:30pm on March 4 and landed
at 7:30am on March 6. When you think about it... what the heck
happened to March 5? It's crazy, isn’t it? March 5 did
not exist this year for us, we can scratch it off the calendar. Frank's
birthday was March 6th; I said to him "imagine if we left a day later?
You wouldn't have had a birthday, now how weird would that be?"
Sitting up in the shotgun seat has it's advantages and disadvantages.
Obviously, one gets a much better seat, food, and service. But
the disadvantage is on taxiing down the runway. Those wheels directly
below us were making all kinds of weird noises, and freaking me out.
I am sure now they were normal, but they weren't to me then. Hearing
those noises triggered my mind to think crazy thoughts, which I imagine
most passengers get when boarding on one of the longest non-stop flights
in the world. Fourteen hours is a long time to be trapped in a flying
tube, but there's a whole list of worse things. To ease my anxieties
I asked a couple of the flight attendants how many times they have done
this flight. Their answers were all the same "I have no idea, maybe
a 100?" A hundred times did the trick.
Being in First Class made the fourteen hours go by
like I was at a party at the playboy mansion. Although, even with
a
flat bed
I didn't sleep much. I think I was just too
excited
about going back to
Oz
.
See you next week!
Johnny Jet
P.S. I ended up getting that picture with
Dick Van Dyke
. Pretty cool, eh?
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