Day 1-ish Monday thru Wednesday, October 20-22

We are sitting on the sun porch of our hotel, overlooking the Brisbane River, and eating a wonderful breakfast of pastries and coffee and tea!!! It looks like it will be a gorgeous day and we are looking forward to spending the day walking around downtown Brisbane.

We were in transit for 28 hours, but our trip was fortunately uneventful and actually seemed to pass fairly quickly. We took the shuttle out of Athens at 2:15pm and picked up a quick dinner in the Atlanta Airport before the flight to LA. We arrived in LA at 8:30 their time (11:30 by our body clock) and left out again at 11:30 their time (2:30 body time)!!! We had thought that we would immediately go to sleep as the plane took off, but managed to stay up long enough to eat a small dinner that they provided about an hour into the trip. Then it was ON with the In-flight Entertainment and deep into Slumber-Land. As usual, I tried to watch several different shows, but only got 15 minutes into them before dropping off. Both Michael and I managed to get several hours of sleep and arrived in Brisbane at 6:05 am on Wednesday morning feeling fairly fresh.

Michael managed to read through a 256 page PhD dissertation during our flying times as well. I dont know how he was able to concentrate on it for that long!!!

We had fun on the Qantas leg of the journey talking to our row mate….a young man who is going to live in Aus for the next 8 months, and also watching a young couple with a little baby using the built-in bassinets that fold down from the bulkhead. It reminded us of the last time we traveled back from Australia with both Jenny and Brian.

We had been given taxi vouchers to get us to the hotel and when we told the driver where we were gong (a 5-star hotel in downtown Brisbane), he raised his eyes at us and smiled. We caught on quickly and accused him of not believing that WE were good enough to be going there. We all had a good laugh about it.

The hotel is gorgeous and the people have already been extremely helpful. They are expediting the clean-up of our room so that we can get in by 8:30am and have provided us with internet vouchers as well.

As I said above, we plan to spend the day walking around this area and trying to soak up all of the sun that we can. The biggest plan for the day is NO SLEEPING UNTIL TONIGHT!!!