We Made it Down Under!

Well we made it!  Our initial flight was an hour late, but that turned out to be our only real glitch in the 24 hour trip.  I am amazed at how well the kids did on the long flight, which was 16 hours.  We left Dallas at 10:00 PM Sunday night, and with the help of some dramamine all three kids were asleep soon after 11:00.  I had a much harder time going to sleep, but was so glad that they slept fairly well.  We definitely had our moments...short seconds where each one would wake up and be so miserable that I thought we were going to really lose it...but thankfully they kept going back to sleep.  We slept on and off until about 7:00 AM central time.  But still had another 7 hours of flying!  Who is the genious who invented those individual movie screens for each airplane seat?!!!  They were a life saver.  Most days if Elise would watch 7 hours of iCarly I would be appalled...but in this case it was bliss!  Of course the kids all hated all of the airplane food.  They were pretty hungry when we landed in Brisbane at 5:00 AM Australia time, and I had to buy them a $40 breakfast on the run to catch our final flight.

We arrived in Sydney at 8:00 AM Tuesday morning.  I was not only flagged as the person who they needed to search for explosive powders, but then since we claimed we had brought some snacks into the country they had their sniffing beagle go through my things as well.  All was fine and we made it through to see Ethan waiting for us outside!  We took a taxi to the hotel.  We have been so tired all day, but really trying to make it through this day to get on their schedule.  Ethan took the day off of work so he could show us around a little bit.  We ate lunch at a subway close to our hotel/apartment, then walked down to Sydney harbour and saw the world famous opera house and the Sydney Bay Bridge. We walked around The Rocks area and came back to the apartment for a quick rest.  Then Ethan and I went to the grocery store downtown close to our hotel.  We got some essentials, things to make for dinner tonight and some lunch and breakfast things, but it all ended up being more than we should have carried in one trip!  Ethan held most of the heavy things and walked so fast to get home I could barely keep up!  And that is after we made quite fools of ourselves at the self check line with way too many items to be self check.  (Yes I can say that we are definitely obvious "Americans" by the way we are dressed and by anything that comes out of our mouths.)

Our aparement is very tiny.  That is all I can say about it.  I'm sure it will work out just fine.  It has everything that we need, laundry, an oven, microwave, small refrigerator, and small dishwasher.  There is even a grill up on the roof by the pool that we are going to grill on tonight.

The downtown urban feel is fun, very cosmopolitan, very busy streets all throughout the day.  We are learning to walk on the left side of the two way walking traffic, just like they drive on that side, that is the norm.  I'm sure that tonight we will go to bed early and we'll be on our own tomorrow since Ethan will be back to work.  We have not taken any pictures yet but will try to post once we do!

Suzanne