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Sept 24

We flew from Brisbane to Sydney and took a cab to hotel on Coogee Beach, which is on Sydney's Tasman Sea coast, not too far from the airport. Picked this locale just to have a little sample of Sydney beach life that evening and the following morning.

My pocket itinerary that I had printed up with all our comings, goings, and doings said we left the following afternoon at 1:25 on our Qantas flight to LAX. Some time the afternoon of the 24th, Dick said, “Are you sure about our departure time? My reservation confirmation document says 10:20am and your itinerary says 1:25pm.” Yikes, he’s right! My flight doc does, too. Way back last spring when we made air reservations our original Qantas plans changed when we added our in-country flights. I had not gotten that change into the itinerary I had typed up and had not caught the mistake in subsequent updates. I’d been using that pocket itinerary for every day’s important times, confirmation numbers, and contact phone numbers. WE COULD HAVE MISSED OUR FLIGHT! Thanks, Dick.

Moral of the story: Check everything. Rely on original documents. Trust, but verify.

At any rate, with much relief, we found an open-air fish place on a street of beach-town sorts of shops and informal restaurants for one last fishandchips – maybe our best. You had your choice of various types of fish displayed in front of you and we chose red snapper, not some lesser variety generally used in takeaway fishandchip houses. Sat on wooden benches on the sidewalk and along with the fishandchips enjoyed the scene and a balmy evening.

The flight east is a little shorter in time than the flight over and it definitely seemed shorter. Watched a couple of movies and read most of Confederacy of Dunces, didn’t sleep. That may help with the jet lag because I didn’t have a problem in either direction this time, unlike our trips to and from Hong Kong last December.

Oh, one cultural oddity I've been meaning to mention is that Australian crossword puzzles are different from U.S. ones (I generally buy a newspaper and do crosswords while traveling). The Aussie puzzles have a lot more spaces and a lot less interconnection among their words. For example, a seven-letter vertical word may have three of its letters not connected with horizontal words -- there's just adjoining spaces. This can leave some words ambiguous, unless you really know what the clue is after. For some Australian place names, I didn't have a chance. I wonder why and how this different structure arose.

Another itinerary disconnect was that after our Qantas flights change, we didn’t change our SW flight home, thinking, on bad information, that the layover was about right. Now, it was seven hours. For a small fee, though, we could change flights, so we did, arriving in ABQ in early afternoon. Susie, who had spent most of this time traveling among her kids, met us.

After a little practice, a day later I think I can drive on the right side now. Have to think about where the turn signals and gas gauge are, though.

So, that’s it: Great trip, memorable times, really good to be home.

Cheers,

Rob