Happy New Year!

Happy new year, everyone! It's been quite a while since I posted on this blog and since I decided to spend the bulk of 2020 away from home I figured I'd revive it.  Similarly to when I've traveled in the past, I'm not promising anyone that I'll keep up with posting, but I'll try... at least for a little while. :) If you find yourself looking at some old posts, please give me a lot of grace while you do so.  I often posted from my phone and/ or while I was tired so typos and sentences that don't quite make sense are more common than is comfortable for me. I'm also entirely too lazy to go back and try to fix any of it.

This year new year's eve was an interesting one for me in that I didn't really have one.  I departed Buffalo, NY on December 30 and arrived in Brisbane, Australia on January 1.  At what point in my travels it was December 31 and for how long I really don't know.  I asked a flight attendant if she knew when we'd actually hit midnight and she didn't know, but told me she'd find out. I promptly fell asleep after asking her about it and never revisited the topic except for during landing when she told me she'd stop at the bottle shop on the way home so that she could have a champagne breakfast. I felt like if we met under different circumstances we'd be friends.

All in all my travel to Australia went smoothly, but traveling across the world really kicks your ass no matter how well it plays out. Honestly, worse than the long flight across the Pacific were the domestic flights.  It took me about 11 hours to get to LAX from Buffalo via Atlanta. Ooooof. I was quite lucky to have a nice couple with an 11-month old baby sit next to me.  Henry nursed through take off and then passed out in a milk coma for the majority of the flight.

My layover in Atlanta was mostly summed up by me inhaling Shake Shack too fast and then feeling nauseous for about two hours. Why won't we have one of those in Rochester?? It's so delicious!  The real excitement of being in Atlanta was me realizing that one of my favorite tennis players, Madison Keys, was on the same fight path as me to Brisbane. I discovered this by looking at her Instagram story, which made me feel a little bit like a stalker. I'll admit I got a little giddy realizing that this professional athlete that I've followed for years was going to be in the same space I was.  It felt serendipitous and like some kind of surreal stamp of approval for my trip by the universe, seeing as my main motivation for coming to Australia was to go to the Australian Open.  I tried to avoid being a total spazz and respect her space, but a friend of a friend who knows her encouraged me to say hi and ask her for a picture if I saw her.  I didn't think that I would because I assumed that she was hanging out in the first class lounge, but after coming back from the bathroom and moving my seat I turned at the exact right moment and saw her walking by.  I cringe because I know I sounded like the exact person I didn't want to be,"Hi Madison, I'm sorry to bother you but I just wanted to let you know I'm a big fan..." Vomit. Of course she was super nice and took a picture with me. I'm clearly cheesing in this picture. I'm going to have to work on that.

When I arrived at LAX and was staring down a 14-hour flight I took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade to an exit row seat. When the cabin doors closed my seat mate and I were lucky enough to have an empty middle seat between us. We were also practically ecstatic when the pilot informed us that our documented flight time of 14 hours and 10 minutes was downgraded to 12 hours and 45 minutes. Don't ask me how that happened. They didn't even say they were making that time up in the air. It was as if we had the wrong estimated flight time from the beginning.

I can't complain about the long flight because I actually slept through most of it, which really surprised me. It seems that the extra leg room really made a difference - well, that, a new travel pillow, and a sleeping pill. (Side note: I cannot recommend the Trtl Travel Pillow enough, particularly for a girl like me who has a long neck and for whom traditional travel pillows do nothing.  You can check out a review of it here. I agree with the reviewer's comments about the downsides being packability and the pillow cumbersome when trying to wear headphones, but something he didn't say was how amazingly soft the fleece is.  It helped keep me warm on the cold, cold plane ride.) The last time I had a major flight like that was when I flew to Hong Kong and I remember being awake much more than this time. I legitimately think I slept for about 8 or 9 hours out of the trip and mainly in two chunks of about 3 to 4 hours at a time.  Sleeping this well really helped me be more rested for a full first day as well as keeping me from being super irritable.

After I landed I had another few hours of a layover and then was off to Prosperpine, which took about 1.5 hours. I slept through most of that flight, but managed to wake up for the snack. Weird that I would do that, huh? LOL Two notes about Virgin Australia: 1) The service was excellent. 2) The food was not. The two meals on the flight over the Pacific were gross. They aligned well with the stereotype of airline food being disgusting.  When I flew to Air China a few years ago their food was quite yummy so I probably had unrealistic expectations.  Something that was pretty cool was that on the long flight Virgin Australia had a little compartment in the bulkhead where they left water, juice, muesli bars, and fruit so that if you woke up during the flight and needed a little sustenance you could just go up and grab it. I'd never seen that before. On my flight from Brisbane to Prosperpine they offered a snack of a muesli bar or chickpea salt and vinegar bites.  I took the salt and vinegar bites.  They were really interesting in that I didn't love them, but I can imagine slowly becoming addicted to them. They definitely grew on me the more I ate.  I don't know if this was a move motivated by improving healthy decision-making, but I was also offered water, coffee, tea, or juice on this flight. I desperately wanted a Coke, but it was $4! So I passed and had water instead. I was pretty proud of myself because throughout the entire trip I did a really good job of mainly drinking water.  I only had ginger ale on one flight because my stomach was feeling unsettled.

As always seems to happen, my plan was to write about my entire first day in Australia, but it's 7:42 PM and I'm finding it difficult to keep my eyes open.  Spoiler alert: I did a great job staying up yesterday and didn't go to sleep at all until about 8:30 PM. I slept through the night like a rock and woke up a 5:30 AM ready to go. Of course, I told myself to F off and made myself go back to sleep for a few hours. My stimulant for my narcolepsy helps me adjust to the time change much better than if I had to deal with the jet lag 100% naturally, but it still seems to be creeping up on me. Days 1 and 2 will have to wait until next time. G'night!