First Post: Originally Written Thursday, Sept. 30

Liz:

I’m writing this sitting in Sydney’s International Airport. It’s 7:56 on Thursday morning, which means that we have skipped Wednesday entirely. While all of you Michiganders are back there, making your way through your Wednesday afternoon, we made our way straight from the 28^th to the 30^th. No more Wednesdays for us, we decided. Well – maybe just not this week.

We can see all kinds of interesting trees from the airport windows, and a great deal of highway traffic. The sky is very blue and bright for so early in the morning. Inside the airport, the most exciting thing is definitely the prices: $3.60 for a miniature coffee, for example, or $17.00 for some airport take-out Chinese food. SEVENTEEN DOLLARS. (Jen: And a bagel costs $4.50. A BAGEL! And that’s not even including cream cheese!) I am not making this up. I thought at first that maybe just Australian dollars weren’t worth very much, but one Australian dollar is .9989 U.S. dollars, so there goes that theory.

Ooh, news update: Jen just spilled one such miniature coffee all over her pants. She points out that at least the coffee scent should mask the B.O. (Give us a break: fourteen hours is a hella long time to sit on a stuffy plane.)

Right, so, we’ve gotten pretty far in our travels so far, and there’re just a couple more hours of layover and a three-hour flight until we deplane in Auckland, New Zealand and commence our six-month adventure. Mostly, I am looking forward to taking off my hiking boots, which, funny story, I am wearing because our suitcases weighed too much; more on that later.

We took off from Detroit at approximately 8 pm EDT Monday night, and flew to Los Angeles. Jen and I were next to a guy named Jeff, a fellow Wolverine, who played varsity soccer at Michigan and had been back in Ann Arbor for an alumni game. He very generously bought us drinks to celebrate the start of the Grand Adventure, and except for some napping, we had some surprisingly interesting conversations on our way to LAX. Definitely the first time I have ever discussed the meaning of love, relationships, or the rigors of investment banking with someone I met on an airplane.

Los Angeles was hot, humid, and thronged with bright, giant, beautiful trees and flowers. It also meant I got to see my great friends Gwen and Mirabeth Braude, which was excellent. Gwen and her boyfriend Rudy picked us up from LAX, and we all went home and crashed, equally exhausted. I’m going to pass this over to Jen now, though:

In the morning at Gwen’s house, I woke up to my sleeping bag sprouting feathers EVERYWHERE. As Liz put it, it looked like I had slept with a chicken. 

Rudy (Gwen’s incredibly nice boyfriend) gave us a ride to the REI in Santa Monica. I exchanged my sleeping bag for a new one for free (go REI!) and then Liz and I spent a while walking around the Santa Monica/beach area. We didn’t see any famous celebrities (sorry Claire!), but because Liz and I are probably the worst at keeping up with pop culture, maybe they were there…maybe...

We figured that New Zealand probably doesn’t have much Mexican food, so we stopped at a little Mexican place called “Lula’s” for lunch. The food was AMAZING; also amazing was their collection of tequila: Lula’s carries 465 kinds. (No….we didn’t sample any.)

We then walked the 5 or 6 miles back to Gwen’s along the beach. Keeping us amused for part of the way was this middle aged man who found it necessary to wear only a black thong bathing suit and to literally scamper through the ocean waves…

(‘Scamper’ is the perfect word for it. The beach was amazing, by the way. The water was freezing and frothy, and there were giant waves crashing all up and down the shore that surfers were taking advantage of. The big gusts of salty, fishy air off the water were happily welcomed to combat the ridiculous heat. Haha…that reminds me of “fish sauce.” Anyway, carrying on…)

Liz and I also made a horrible discovery in LA:  On the way to LA, each piece of luggage was allowed to be 50 lbs. For the flight to New Zealand, each person’s COMBINED two pieces had to be less than 70 lbs. Liz and I both had about 84 lbs each…you can see how this was a problem.

To save the $100 apiece, Liz and I did what any cheap student traveler would do: we left all of our extra snacks and toiletries in LA and showed up to the airport wearing our hiking boots, wool socks, fleece sweaters, fleece jackets, and carrying about 90 lbs. in our carry-ons.  Needless to say, Liz and I were very, umm, HOT, in the airport. But we made it! And saved some money!

Note: A thank you must be made to Gwen who let us stay at her house and who drove us to/from the airport and Mirabeth, who kept us amused with anecdotes of boys while we repacked all of our bags.

Yes, thank you so much to the Braudes, for rides, a place to sleep, and great conversation and company. You guys rock and it was awesome to see you. J

I have to make a plug at this point for Trader Joe’s “Gummy Tummies Penguins,” which Claudia and Corinna dropped off for me the morning of my departure. They are awesome. We have been hard-core eating them since leaving Detroit and it is very sad that we are going to run out soon.

This entry is getting longer than any blog entry deserves to be, so I’ll sum up the flight quickly: Long. Quite long. I discovered many new ways of contorting my body in order to sleep, and watched more movies and television than I have in a long time. The food wasn’t half bad though, and pretty much everybody on the plane had Australian accents, which amused me to no end. Jen was sitting next to an elderly Australian couple across the aisle from me, and they gave her their names, address, and phone number within the first three minutes of meeting her. As the plane took off into the air, the man bounced up in his seat and shouted, “Bye America!” Also – ha – Jen tells me that she kept waking up to the tiny old man literally leaping over her to get into or out of his seat. He is possibly half-Kangaroo.

I promise all of our entries won’t be this long; five hours is just a long time to sit in an airport, and the time needs to be occupied somehow.

           I just read Liz’s description of the couple sitting next to me and started laughing. Yes, this older couple was AWESOME. They were probably about 70 and have traveled all over the world. They live in Tasmania and own a bed and breakfast that they operate whenever they’re actually home. When the plane took off and I gave a start, the man gave a wild, “Whoop!” in addition to the yell of, “Gooooood bye America!!!!!!” And the best part about this couple? They are still terribly in love. You could just tell. The man fell asleep with his head on his wife’s shoulder with his arms wrapped around her. They would hold hands when watching tv shows.  They were great. And gave me great advice on where to visit.  And the part-kangaroo part: NO JOKE. I was sitting on the aisle sleeping with my head on the tv tray (nice advice, Andy!) and woke SEVERAL times to this man leaping over my head from his seat next to me to the aisle. It was ridiculous.