Australia – Travel

Australia has always been right near the top of my list of places to travel to. Ever since living there as a kid (I was about 8 years old at the time) I’ve wanted to go back and visit the ol’ stomping grounds where my family spent a year while my dad worked there consulting. I remember that Australia was my dream playground as a little boy who loved the outdoors, bugs, and essentially any critter that could kill me. I remember being woken up in the morning to what sounded like monkeys, but ended up learning were kookaburras. My family even had what we claimed to be our own pet blue-tongued lizard that we fed little bits of leftover meals and lived in our gutter . Long story short, I have only the fondest memories of living in Australia as a kid, and finally I’ve been able to go back! My family and I recently spent a whirlwind week traveling all over the eastern coast of Australia, spending a couple days in Brisbane, Cairns, and Sydney.

     First off, traveling to Australia from the U.S is miserable. I know as someone who loves traveling I should be comfortable with long flights, and I believe I handle them pretty well, but a 14 hour flight is almost never fun. That wasn’t the only problem though. The airline we were flying with managed to have some sort of computer system malfunction that caused the first leg of our flight to be delayed 3 hours. 3 hours for a system malfunction?! Nothing was wrong with the plane, pilots were both there, we were all boarded, but some document couldn’t get processed because something was wrong with the computers… As a developer myself, I can’t imagine working with a system that relies so heavily on a digitized version of a document that a physical copy can’t be made and done by hand faster than 3 hours. I can only imagine how much money they lost because of this issue, as I’m sure we weren’t the only ones dealing with this. That 3 hour delay of course caused us to miss our connecting flight (which happened to be the long 14-hour flight) and we couldn’t be rescheduled until the next morning. Our wonderful luck didn’t stop there either. The airline managed to screw it up even more by failing to transfer our booking to the partner airline that our re-booked flights were with so we couldn’t check in or get boarding passes to our new flight, causing us to miss it because my family and I didn’t give ourselves enough time to fix that problem and then still get on the plane.  Oh well, we FINALLY are able to get on a direct flight to Brisbane later that night, so luckily I slept through a fair portion of the flight. When I was awake though, to my dismay we were flying on a very old Boeing 747 that wonderfully didn’t have any outlets like I thought most modern airplanes would have, especially these long international flights. So essentially I avoided using any devices that couldn’t be charged with a USB (which they did have chargers at each seat for) which prevented me from using my laptop, but not a huge deal I guess.