Apparently not 'Stealth Silence' till Thursday ....

Friday 3:00pm Leave house because I am a chicken – pretty sure that I am going to have problems with checking my bags all the way to Australia. Linda and Dana insist on coming in with me. Apparently I was accompanied by angels. Everything went smoothly and then I just had to sit for hours for my 7:00 flight.

Friday 9:00pm In LA watching with horror a group, huge group of high school students mill about me as I wait for my flight to Australia. The angels must have decided to stay in the City of Angels and had abandoned me before I even got to the Quantas Airlines counter. Had a middle seat – all he could do is give me a window. I knew that in 14 hours, I would be up many times, so my plan was to convince the person in the isle seat that they did not want to be getting up for me every hour or so.

Friday 11:00pm I am on the plane. Convinced the guy to swap me. The lady in the middle had wanted an isle too and mistakenly thought that I would take the middle and give her the isle. Hah! I am not that nice – she was old and feeble and looking rather desperate, but I knew I would be bothering her also – so I told her I would get up every time she wanted me to – no problem. The gentleman got up once in a 14 hour flight! She got up maybe 3 times.

Me? You so don’t want me to go there, but here we go.

I am wandering around the plane, thinking I am doing pretty well, when the captain came on and said the time in Brisbane was 5:07 – so I immediately set my watch. Ok, now if we get in at 6:10 – how many hours has it been? I had felt like about 5. I did the math and it said I had 13 hours left – we had been gone barely an hour! I started a mantra I chanted in my head “Kill me now”. Do you know how many times you can say that in 13 hours? I can tell you it is a lot.

So – I decided about hour 2 that this was like some big ‘time out’ - a 14 hour time out in the naughty chair. Sure, the naughty chair had TV on demand, games, news, etc, but do I like any of those things? Do I do any of those things? No. If could have had my laptop the entire time that would have been great. Unfortunately the guy in front of me was a line backer and reclined his seat and apparently broke it since it was sitting in my lap the entire flight. The lady next to me kept telling me to tell someone, but it just seemed so typical and I would have had to stop chanting….

Made getting out of the seat especially difficult – I became very good at contortions. I looked like a fool and didn’t especially care.

The plane was huge – 3 seats on each side and 4 in the middle. They were pretty good in feeding us, but the funniest, most humorous part of the entire trip was the turbulence! We were jostled nonstop like we were in the back of a huge bus, it’s back wheels sliding back and forth continually.

The bathrooms (a ton of them) were the greatest. I would go and just sit in one to stretch my back out. As I was sitting there once we started to roller coaster and I was being bashed about the bathroom laughing hysterically thinking it was a right proper way to die – in an airplane bathroom! Have a bruise on my forehead from hitting the door a bit too hard.

People outside the bathroom looked a little scared of me as I left to walk around the 6 foot space between 6 of the bathrooms. Did I care? I was too busy chanting “Kill me now” to barely notice.

I told myself that at the halfway point (11:00pm –we were getting in at 6:10 in the morning.) I could take my bra off - it was driving me crazy and I had a stupid mickey sweat shirt on over my shirt since I had forgotten to take my jacket with me when I left for the airport. Didn’t do it since I didn’t know what to do with it when it was off. At approximately 4:00am I did take it off and by that time I was so seriously demented I could have walked back to the seat with it on my head and I really would not have cared.

All in all it was seriously like sitting in a time out chair staring at the wall for 14 hours. I really don’t recommend it. I don’t think I am the same person that stepped on the plane and I know that in approximately 10 days I will be doing it again. You have no idea how scary that feeling is.

So that was the flight – decided not to break it down hour by hour – I did in my head (between chants of “Kill me now”) but it would be just as tedious to read as it was to live.

Got through customs. Got one bag, then waited 45 more minutes for my second bag to show up. Then went through a Disney like maze to get through some sort of scanner. I was scanning for soil or any food items.

As Gary was moving – I watched him clean the treads of all his shoes and when I asked him what in the hell he was doing, he muttered something about not wanting his air shipment being quarantined. I thought he was nuts till I went through that line. Folks: Australia does not want your soil, your insects, you wood products – nothing that would grow and change its eco-system. I have no idea if this is working for them or not but I passed – an hour and a half after I got off the plane.

When Gary saw me he was surprised. He decided I had been quarantined and was off somewhere with people in white jumpsuits, surgical gloves and masks and didn’t know how he was going to find me. I was pleased he had such faith in me – but, man - was I sick! It was now Sunday morning at 7:30am – and even though I did not exactly live through 3 days on a plane – my body feels like it actually did…

Got to Gary’s apartment (will have a section with photos) and crashed in the master bed all Sunday day and night. Gary found me Monday morning sobbing in the guest room. I kept crashing into things, stubbing my toes and was ill and hurt everywhere. As I sobbed, he unpacked my bags, hanging up my clothes and putting my stuff away – I live out of the guest room and bathroom. It works for us to have our stuff separated. I wanted him to have the master since this was his bachelor pad and I would keep my stuff out of his way. He made me get up and watch the sun rise out the huge wall to wall windows in the apartment. Which I did, still sobbing – for what reason I really don’t know.

Monday was a holiday for Gary and so I got my act together and we went for a drive to a light house I wanted to take photos of. Since about 10,000 other Aussies had the same idea, when we entered the queue to just sit in our car and wait to enter the city about 2km out – we decided we were not going to find parking and turned around and gave up. Came home, I took a nap – Gary finished the first season of ‘Life’ so now I am going to watch it.

Tuesday the movers brought the air shipment that was not quarantined – so Gary must have done a pretty good job. The opened his golf clubs – scrubbed clean of soil. Opened the garbage cans – clean. Very impressive and the reason Gary vacuumed and mopped the garage floor since that was where they packed and he didn’t want any sawdust on the outside of the packages gumming up his chances of not getting his stuff. Not bad.

Got everything unpacked and I crashed in bed. Gary continued to clean up as I drifted off to sleep.

Wednesday morning: nothing to do all day – cleaned the kitchen, continued the laundry, then decided to do the unthinkable and go outside. Found that the small 24hour convieninece store right next to Gary’s apartment has an internet café!

So now I am sitting in the internet cafe - having a grand ole time - with Gary's apartment towering out the window in front of me.

Thought I would at least dump everything I had written so far. Tomorrow the guy comes and hopefully I will be able to do this from our beautiful living/dining room.

Over and out ...