20100830 En Route MEL
This is the day that never was. We departed LAX late on the 29th and will arrive MEL (Melbourne) after breakfast on the 31st after crossing the international date line.
As I type this paragraph, we are north of Fiji and east of the Solomons and south of Tarawa. We have 3,000 miles still to travel until we arrive at MEL. We're at 38,000 feet making 561mph. The time in LA is 1000 in LA and 0300 in MEL. We've been in the air just over ten hours, with 5:47 remaining.
As I recently went to the lavatory and looked out a window, I saw a light. There must be an island below us. For exercise, I'll try to figure out which it is. After some looking around on Google Earth, it was probably Tuvalu.
Our course took us close to Howland Island, the one Amelia Earhardt couldn't find on her attempt to fly around the world.
This humongous plane is really something. We're on the upper deck aft, in Premium Economy. Ahead of us is Business and all the way forward is First Class. The lower deck is all Economy, also known as the cattle car. In Premium, it's about half full, so there's plenty of room to move around. There is an open window seat, so I'll probably move over there when we reach the OZ coast – it will be daylight then; right now we're traveling west with the night.
We were fed a nice little dinner after take-off, with plenty of wine offered. We didn't take much, since we've been guzzling wine the last few days. D watched a movie for a while, as she's doing now. I finished a book and went to sleep, probably around 0100 PDT.
The ride has been ok, but there have been a number of moderately bumpy patches. The back of this plane seems to wag left and right with turbulence.
I'll end this and start a new page for our arrival.
20100831 ….. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (Picture Link)
Well, here we are down under. We arrived more-or-less on time. The mob stampeded off the huge A380. We cleared immigration, then fought the mob to get our bags. We cleared customs and found the rental car. Then we hit the road to our motel for the night.
Driving on the other side of the road definitely keeps one alert. The GPS kept us out of severe trouble in traveling through downtown Melbourne to the suburbs southeast of town. We found the motel (a Best Western), but we were too early to check in. We left our luggage there (mistake #1) and headed for a tourist attraction called Puffing Billy.
Puffing Billy Railway is a narrow-gage (30”) railroad re-created by volunteers (300 of them) to be a tourist railroad. Originally, the tracks it uses were installed to serve communities east of Melbourne with an inexpensive railway – narrow-gage is much cheaper to build than standard-gage.
It uses several different steam engines, including four 2-6-2 tank engines and one 2-6-0+0-6-2 Garrett patent locomotive. There are a few diesels around for use when there's a ban on using the coal-fired steam engines. We then remembered we'd left the camera in the luggage at the motel.
It was cool and where there was a good breeze, cold. But we enjoyed the ride, had meat pies and talked with several nice Aussies. Due to mistake #1, we’d left our cameras in the luggage in the motel. No pictures, other that a few we managed to take with the built-in camera in the MacBook. One group of three elderly ladies insisted on taking our picture so they could e-mail it to us later.
Then back to the motel around 1600 and checked in and moved into a frigid room. The heater controls are a little vague, but we think it's warming up. We'll go to the lounge for a drink in a minute, then dine in the motel's restaurant. More later...
Back after dinner – very nice. Now we're doing catch-up on e-mails and that sort of thing.
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