Departure – Australia
The day that we had all waited for had finally arrived! I was leaving for the USA!
My day began really early in the morning well and truly before the sun had risen. We all arrived at Townsville airport by 4 am. Although the first flight out of Townsville to Brisbane doesn’t leave til 6am our tour leader thought it would be a good idea to have us all there nice and early with no chance of missing our flight. That and the fact that they (Renee and Carmel) had to organise 14 kids plus themselves!! As Townsville has no international airport (actually not technically correct as it is an international airport – it just doesn’t function as one) we were flying to Sydney via Brisbane. We were all checked in, we said our good byes and we boarded the flight. At last we were on our way!. After a relatively short flight (it only takes 1 and a half hours) we landed in Brisbane. This is where we met up with the group from Cairns. The two groups were to travel together only splitting up when we went to host families in Seattle.
We were marched (almost literally, think of Madeline) down to the boarding gate for the flight to Sydney. Even though we would be travelling with the Cairns group, there was a group from Brisbane heading over as well and we were all on the same flight (can you imagine over 40 teenagers on 1 plane – i’m sure the flight attendents had a headache thinking about it). Another 2 hours passed and we landed in Sydney. We split with the Brisbane group as they joined the Sydney group as the two groups were flying into different locations. We were flying into San Fransisco.
At Sydney airport we were taken straight to the international terminal to check in and make our way through customs. This actually didn’t take long as Renee and Carmel took all of our passports to the counter and they checked us in as a group. Once through, we were allowed to look around for an hour before meeting at the boarding gate.
Having been up early in the morning and only eating airplane food (which back then was not that crash hot) we headed off to get something real to eat. We all met up again at the gate and were finally allowed to board the plane. I had a window seat thankfully. We settled in for the long flight ahead. Most of us, despite out excitement were able to sleep.
14 hours later we arrived in San Fransisco. You’d think this would be the end of our travels for the day, but n0. After going through customs we took a short flight to Los Angeles werfe the flights would end and the sightseeing to begin.
Tags: flights, West Coast America
Carley
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