LAX-BNE

Hey Everyone! I'm FINALLY hooked up to some decent wifi, and as such am going to start posting my blog entries going back to last week, in order, as per Antarctica. Here's the first one!

July 14-16, 2012:

SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN – Well, nearly a year of preparation later, we are finally underway! Having only been to Sydney, I am most excited to head to Queensland and see a lot of a new part of Australia.

After one last In-N-Out burger, Paula and I met our delegates at one of their houses, took some departure photos, loaded up the coach, and we set off for LAX! Most of the students were a bit sad to say goodbye to their parents, but after a few minutes on the coach we were excited to be officially on the People to People Exploring Australia trip! At LAX, check-in and security were smooth, our gate was very close, and after about 30 minutes we met Kerri, Kelly, and Stephanie, the three other Teacher Leaders on our trip with Paula and I, and the rest of the students from Pennsylvania – we have 44 in total. Those guys flew from Philadelphia to Dallas and onto LAX – needless to say, they were pretty tired by the time we even met them.

About an hour later we all boarded our QF (Qantas) flight 16, a classic Boeing 747-400 double-decker jumbo jet to Brisbane! A few of our students had never even been on a plane before, so they sure got quite the introduction to flying with a 14-hour version!

July 14, 2012 - Our CA delegation departure photo!

Most of us were seated together. I was next to R’Rian, one of our LA-area students, and we had a bit of an adventure from the start. She had a safe lock on her backpack, which is fine, except what she swore was the code, 1-2-1, was not working. Uhhh… uh oh! I tried fiddling around with it for a bit and nothing was doing. After 15 mins of random guessing, I got a little methodological with it and decided I would try every combination, starting with 0-0-0. About 40 mins later, 2-3-3 did the trick, and needless to say she won’t be using that safe lock anymore!

That bit of fun aside, most of us started watching our movies and we were in the air to Australia! To the right we could see the lights of Ventura, and then that was about it! Nothing but the largest ocean in the world, the Pacific, between us and our destination. I watched 21 Jump Street, which was actually quite good, and had some decent chicken breast for dinner. Most of the students were pleasantly surprised by the food as well. After dinner I dozed off to sleep…

About seven hours later, I woke up to see we were over halfway into our flight, had crossed the international date line, and as such it was July 16 – July 15, 2012 will never exist in our lives. Kind of crazy. Dawn slowly approached the plane from behind as we were served breakfast, and we began our descent into Brisbane!