We arrived to our hotel at 10 AM Monday morning local time after the epic flight from LA to Sydney. I sit here writing this on Tuesday morning at 7 AM, so anyone who knows me can reasonably assume my internal clock is still a bit miscalibrated if I’m being productive this early.
First, let’s talk about the flight. Seattle – LA – Sydney makes for a long day in coach. I timed the actual flight and our time in the air from takeoff to landing was 13 hours and 58 minutes on the LA – Sydney leg. By the way, after a super long flight the last thing you want to hear as you get to the terminal is the PA in the plane saying “We are having problems starting the auxiliary generator and can not get the door open until that happens. They are sending a technician now. The Captain has lit the seat belt light so would you kindly take your seats.” Ugh. Besides that, the flight was not as excruciating as I thought it might be. Basically you leave at 11 PM and they give you a meal straight away. Then most people sleep. The in flight entertainment is really good, quite a few new movies that are not on DVD yet and tons of TV shows. After the first meal there is quite a bit of downtime until about 3 hours out from Sydney they serve breakfast. So basically everyone that is good at sleeping on the plane just treats the flight as one really long night time. Leave LA on Saturday night late and get to Sydney 14 hours later on Monday morning. Losing Sunday altogether.
The amount of airline miles it takes for this trip would give us the option of three flights of similar length in coach or two in business. Business was not available for this trip so the decision was made for us.
Of course upon arrival our hotel was not ready for early check in, so we left the bags (All the bags, including our rain coats which proved crucial. Only at the last second did I grab a jacket, also crucial.), grabbed a map and headed out into the city.
Sydney is probably the one city that has more coffee shops than Seattle so getting an espresso kick start was not a problem. We walked all around the downtown, eventually ending up down by the water with views of the Sydney Opera House. By this time it was raining really hard so I don’t have any pictures yet. It seemed a lot more like Seattle in November than Sydney in November. At least it wasn’t cold as I was really wet only having shorts, sandals and my Sounders jacket. We bought Paty and umbrella which was a good call.
We did stumble upon a big event in the Aussie sports calendar. There is a big bi-annual cricket match between England and Australia called The Ashes. It’s one of those best of 5 international test matches, meaning 5 sets of 5 day long cricket matches. What we stumbled into was the selection day press conference for the first match. The coach was reading off the names of the selected players on live TV at Noon. The captain and another player were there taking some questions. Here’s a horrible picture:
Now it was raining really hard, so what to do but find a pub? We ended up in The Rocks District, very friendly place. Decent food and good local beer.
Well, I’ve rambled on long enough with little pictures. We got into our hotel fine. Took a very refreshing nap and spent the evening walking around Sydney. This time we had jackets and hats so we were good. I also switched from my camera to the waterproof camera I borrowed in order to take underwater snorkeling pictures so I have pics of the Chinese place we went for dinner.
Yes, that’s me eating in China Town. Crazy, I know. But it was fabulously good and I imagine we will go back.
Afterward we walked around a bit more, as you can see from the pic below it was a pretty gloomy night, but the monsoon had passed. We then called it an early night.
Today we are meeting up with a walking tour of Sydney at 10:30 that takes a few hours. After that we’ll see if the tour gave us any good ideas for the day.
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