Sydney to Seattle

I left Sydney at 15:00 on the 7th of July. The Flight to Auckland was only about 3 hours and pleasant. I managed to sit next to 2 nice young gentleman who had just come back from the hillsong church convention. Infact it seems that many people on the plane were flying back from hillsong. One guy was flying home to Canada and one returning to NZ. The canadian seemed to be talking about all his involvement in that Kony 2012 stuff. The kiwi seemed to have great trouble with my accent, which doesn't bode well for the us! Furthermore the Chinese flight attendant seemed to think I was speaking chinese to him! Going to have learn how to enunciate better!

Because the sydney to auckland flight was delayed, it was a rush to get on to the plane to LA. Once on, it was a long 12 hour journey. This is not the longest flight I've been on - I swear one of the legs from Australia to the uk was 15 hours - but it was pretty tough going near the end there. The air NZ food was really good at least! I was sitting next to nice 40ish man who was heading to Jamaica. His family was in NZ but he worked in Jamaica, so he was returning from a couple of weeks holiday. Nice guy, but when he fell asleep he kind of spread out across to my seat!

LAX was a fucking pain in the ass. I got out of the flight and the fist thing I had to do was go through customs. They were nice enough, but the guy seemed to be very interested in the details of my bike. What kind of bike? Why that one? Etc. I don't think he was just interested, I think he was trying to assess whether I had thought through this trip or not. The scariest bit was when he said "well let's see of the machine accepts you..." not sounding too confident. But thankfully the machine did accept my visa and my fingerprints, so I moved on to baggage claim.

The worst thing was that after exiting the baggage claim, there was no indication of where to go. I had no idea how many terminals LAX had, which ones were domestic, which one to go to or how to get there. So I found an air NZ counter, and they told me I had to go to terminal 7 for my connecting united airlines flight to Seattle. And after asking a few more people I found the terminal shuttle bus that goes to each terminal. Once in terminal 7 (which I think was both domestic and international?) I fumbled my way to the UA gates, where people gave me directions in short broken English. I had to go through security again (including those naked, cancer giving TSA scanners), it seemed chaos. In these ones you have to take off your shoes and belt, and they check underneath your watch and neck chain - for what I'm not exactly sure.



I finally found my gate, and sat there for half an hour or so and bought some wifi off t-mobile for the day. The flight to Seattle was ok, the plane was pretty dodgy (and pretty damn small), but the single flight attendant was nice enough. Another guy and i volunteered to be moved from the front to the back as the weighting of the plane was wrong, which resulted in a round of applause and thankyous for the other passengers. Was it really that hard? I didn't seem like I was being put out at all? I suppose they said if no one moved it'd take 20 minutes longer to shuffle the cargo around.

After touching down in Seattle, I took the train (!) to baggage claim, where I saw Josh and Wendy who I am staying with for the next few weeks. I was really glad to see some familiar faces!