Greetings!
The most astute of my readers will likely have noticed that my Journal posts have been absent for the past 11 days or so. This is due to the fact that I was abroad in Australia. While I did have occasional access to the internet, I knew there would just be far too much to report here in the Journal, so I elected to wait until I returned to the USA to share my stories.
I returned to the States this morning, landing in San Francisco at about 10 a.m. Amber and I left Adelaid at about 9 a.m. on Sunday (Aussie time) and landed in San Francisco at 10 a.m. on Sunday (US time), meaning that we have had the distinct honor of having a 40-hour-long Sunday! Needless to say, I am rather exhausted at the moment. As such, I expect this particular post to be brief, but you should expect to see a series of posts about the holiday down under.
The flight over was long, but I managed to sleep longer than I thought I would, making it much more reasonable. I probably slept for about 5 of the 13.5 hours we were in the air. The worst part of the flight, to be honest, was sitting on the tarmac for a full hour once we were already in the ground in Sydney on Friday morning (we missed Thursday entirely). There is something about being SO CLOSE to getting off the plane and just not being able to. The first half hour of that wait was spent waiting for our gate to clear, and the next halfhour was spent sitting at the gate while Quarantine Officers boarded the aircraft to "clear it." This delay on the ground, unfortunately, put Amber and I in somewhat of a tight spot. We had a connection to make to Adelaide, but it was on an entirely different airline. This meant that we not only had to clear Customs & Immigration in Sydney, but we also have to transfer terminals, check in with a new airline, drop our bags, and go through a whole new batch of security.
Customs & Immigration is where I thought we would lose the most time, but we actually sped right through it. Transferring to the other terminal is what ended up taking the longest. We had to take a bus from the International Terminal to the Domestic Terminal. Sadly, the shuttle isn't free, and they take only Aussie dollars, a fact we learned only after trying to board the bus. We didn't have any Australian money, so we missed the first bus as went in search of the ATM we were told about. Upon reaching the ATM, I discovered, much to my dismay, that it was our of order. This left only one option - foreign currency exchange. The Travelex office we went to charged a whopping A$8 commission on our trade! We traded only US$50, which should have yielded about A$67, but instead we got only A$59. Once we made it to the Domestic Terminal, all was well with the world. Checking in took about 90 seconds and we whisked through security with only a minor incident transpiring between Amber and one of the Aussie security officers regarding a harmless pair of cuticle scissors.
By 11 a.m. or so we were in Adelaide. Once we got to our townhouse at Westlakes, I hopped right into the swimming pool for a nice cool down. By eveningtime, we headed out for a barbeque dinner, and then back home for bed.
Speaking of bed, mine is looking pretty tempting right about now.
So this is meant to be an ad for becoming a vegetarian. Personally, I don't buy it. It is true that we eat other animals, but there is a huge difference between a cow and a dog. First off, I just don't think that a cow makes a very good pet. This is not to say that you can't have a pet cow; indeed, some people do have pet cows. But you can't play fetch with a cow, you can't pick up a cow or summon one up onto the bed. You can't play chase with a cow, or have a cow bring you your newspaper and slippers. Cows don't bark when the doorbell rings. Pretty much the only four things cows are good for are: