Carlson Honeymoon! Volume I: Australia, Part I: Here we go!

I didn't allow myself to start packing until the day before we left. I knew that if I did it any earlier I would get too excited and stressed out! We laid out a blanket, turned on Lord of the Rings (of course!), and started gathering our things.

On Saturday, November 7th, we got up early, finished packing, and then headed to the Chicago airport to catch our afternoon flight to LAX.

We got to the airport a few hours early (I call this "Courtney Standard Time") so we went to Macaroni Grill to get lunch and Garrett Popcorn to stock up on snacks before our long flights. 

Our flight from Chicago to LAX was pretty easy. I tried not to sleep since I wanted to sleep on the big flight but I'm pretty sure I nodded off a few times. We had a five hour layover at LAX. We took this time to change our voicemails, call our families, eat a delicious Mexican dinner, and walk around the terminal. 

[Our GIANT Airbus]

The flight from LAX to Melbourne, Australia, was 14.5 hours (according to the pilot, it was a "quick" flight). Ugh! Luckily, Quantas is a nice airline that specializes in these long flights. We had our own TVs with hundreds of movies and TV shows, we were fed multiple times (full meals with snacks which were pretty decent), and I had fancy BOSE noise canceling headphones which turned out to be completely worth the $300!

The flight left LA at 10:45 PM. I was able to sleep for about 7 hours which seemed to help me not have such bad jet lag. I spent the rest of the time reading or watching The Big Bang Theory and Lord of the Rings :-)

This map shows our entire trip:

Here are some close ups:
The southern star is Melbourne, the star in the middle of the country is Alice Springs, the star southwest of that is Yulara, the star in the northeast is Cairns, and the star on the southeast coast is Sydney.

Life's an adventure! Here we go!