Bob:
Some trips start out with a whimper, but others start out with a bang. I had packed a day early and was sincerely hoping for the former for our Return to the Land of Oz, but that was not to be. On the morning of our departure we were all packed and had checked off all of our miscellaneous errands to do before the trip, so we nonchalantly decided to take our usual walk around the neighborhood, a 3 mile loop that takes us 50 minutes or so.
That went fine until we were a block away from returning to our house when Monika suddenly felt in her jacket pocket and exclaimed, "I've lost my keys!" After double-checking all pockets and ascertaining that she had indeed been the one to lock the door when we had set off for our walk, we started searching for her keys. She doubled back on our walking route while I hustled home, jumped in the car, and drove off to the section of the walk where she had become hot enough to remove her coat, which she figured was the most likely place to have dropped them.
Well that failed, so we double-checked back at home but that was also fruitless. Monika finally gave up for the nonce and turned to fixing lunch while I hiked yet another loop around our walking route to double-check every inch of it. But in the end it was all in vain, and we had to set off on our journey not only exhausted with all the walking but also with the disquieting knowledge in the back of our minds that a set of keys to our house and automobile was floating around loose somewhere in our neighborhood. Ah well.
The taxicab to the airport turned out to be an old, rusty, beaten-up Crown Victoria. The trunk lid was so bent that it would not latch shut, so during the ride each bump in the road was accompanied by the "Ka-Klunk!" counterpoint from the trunk lid banging down on our luggage in back. That could have been unnerving, but I figured our luggage was densely packed enough that the beating wouldn't hurt it. Fortunately our luggage was also heavy enough that there was almost no chance that a piece of it would actually bounce out of the trunk onto the roadway, which was yet another disturbing possibility given that the shock absorbers were worn out and the car bounded over bumps like a kangaroo. But in the event we arrived intact and wheeled our way over to the American Airlines counter where we checked in to get our boarding passes for the flight to Los Angeles which connected with the Qantas flight to Sydney.
Although the security screening lines had been relocated to a brand new location on the ground floor of the terminal, the train system connecting the 4 terminals at Dulles had not yet been completed. So of necessity we took one of the old "mobile lounges" (think huge bus that can go up and down like an elevator!) from the main terminal over to terminal B, a trip that for us was filled with nostalgia as those mobile lounges have been an integral part of Dulles airport since its inception in the 1960s, I think. We arrived at our gate two hours early and sat beside a window to eat some hard-boiled eggs and rolls while we waited for our flight to Los Angeles to depart, but that was good as it turned out because it gave the TSA luggage screeners time to dissassemble my suitcase, find the jars of homemade jam I had stuffed into my spare shoes, and throw everything back in a totally random fashion. I regret making the TSA folks work so hard, but conversely sometimes I wonder why I take so much time to carefully pack things when the they are certain to inspect my luggage and randomly re-arrange it! But at least we were early enough that our luggage made it onto the plane and followed us successfully to Sydney.
We were certainly not fed and in fact barely offered water, juice or soda during the five-hour American Airlines flight to Los Angeles. We resisted, however, this blatant attempt to starve us into submission and hoped that Qantas would feed us on the next leg of the journey. We had a two-hour layover between flights and once in the air it took Qantas another couple hours to get around to serving dinner, so we were famished by that point. But the meal was worth the wait as the food was excellent. We were travelling on the very newest Airbus A 380, the huge double-decked airplane that Qantas has configured to carry 450 passengers although other airlines may cram in 600 or more, I believe. We liked the airplane very much as turbulence seemed to affect it less than a 747 or 777, possibly due to its greater mass, and the interior felt very spacious.
Another advantage of the A-380 was that In the very back of our deck was a kind of self-service snack bar with snack items like apples, brownies, and spiced almonds plus beverages such as water, juice, or sodas freely available, and we took advantage of those snacks several times during the 15 hour flight. I fell into a pattern of sleeping for 2 or 3 hours and then walking back to the snack bar and having a snack while stretching out all the kinks. Unfortunately, during the night I noticed that my ankles were swelling up. About the time they became the size of navel oranges and I couldn't see my ankles anymore, I tried the expedient of lying on the floor off to one side of the snack bar and propping my legs up against the bulkhead to try to reduce the fluid accumulation. That seemed to reduce the pressure under the skin, but the swelling remained and only gradually decreased during our first couple of days in Sydney.
Qantas also fed us a nice breakfast meal about two hours out of Sydney. Once back on the ground, I fortunately could still (but just barely) lace up my shoes for shuffling through Australian Immigration and Customs. We dutifully declared we were importing several jars of homemade jam to the proper authorities and were once again waved through without having our luggage further inspected, which was jolly decent of them. Having had a decent amount of sleep on the flight, I could cope with using the automatic ticket machine to purchase tickets out to Hornsby where Neville and Lyn lived and that allowed us to avoid a queue at the ticket counter and catch a train that was just departing.
It was fun seeing some of the same sights we had seen during Wanderung 20, but now in early summer as opposed to late fall. Flowers and some trees were blooming, and I was especially impressed by the brilliant purple blooms of the jacarunda tree. Once out in Hornsby we rolled our luggage two blocks over to Neville and Lyn's place and then just kind of crashed into their welcoming embrace. After installing our luggage in one of their bedrooms we settled in for a nice chat to catch up on what had been happening in our respective families in the last few months. But just as Lyn predicted from her experiences returning from the U.S. on those long westward flights, we hit a big wall of fatigue right around 3:00 p.m. and simply could not keep our eyes open. Instead, we fell dead asleep for two hours but after that we were able to at least return to some semblance of coherency in the evening although I have no clear recollection of what we said or did. And thus we returned to the Land of Oz.
