Touching down in Sydney!

After an extremely long journey, we’ve made it to Sydney! After we got on the plane in Cincinnati, we spent four hours getting to LA. There, we got to have dinner with Holly’s brother, Rocky. After a quick dinner of cheesey rolls at Red Lobster, we dropped into Target to get a new packpack for Holly. Apparently the one she was using that had a hole in the bottom (which was actually my backpack) wasn’t good enough, so we needed a quick upgrade. After dinner, we went back to LAX, and at 10:40 p.m., we began our 15+ hour journey to Australia. Thankfully, our trip there was entirely in the dark, so we were actually able to sleep away almost half the flight! Unfortunatley, the trip back will start at 9:15 a.m., so no such sleeping away the trip on the return flight.

After we got into Sydeny, we immediatley came here to Westend Backpackers, the hostel we’ll be staying in when we return to Sydeny from Adelaide. This place is great, and they have huge storage lockers where we were able to ditch our ginormous packs for a leisurley stroll around the city. We went over to the Opera House (where we purchsed tickets for a classical music performance next Saturday night), walked around “the Rocks”, and went to Chinatown. We are definatley tired, however, and I have no doubt that we’ll be able to get a good amount of sleep on the bus to Melbourne tonight.

So far, the experience hasn’t been too crazy. Sydney is like most nice, metropolitan European-style cities. We’re excited to start our trek to “the bush” tonigh, though, and are more the eager for Friday morning to get here to begin our journey out to the Ranges.

One thought that did strike us, however, on the way out of the country, was just how much of the United States we still have to see. As we got ready to explore the outback of Australia, we flew over the deserts and mountains of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, realizing that neither of us had been to either of these places. Maybe the next Heaton trip will be more of an “inward” experience?

Here are some pictures of the start of our journey:

At the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Int'l Airport, with our ridiculously heavy packs.

 

We decided to get our stomachs ready for the trip with a pre-flight stop at Outback Steakhouse in the airport.

 

That’s all for now. More updates to come from Melbourne, hopefully!

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~ by aandhheaton on May 19, 2010.