Arrived In Brisbane

I made it to Brisbane. I am officially in the land down under, Australia. The flights over here were pretty uneventful. The flight from PHX to LA was packed. Upon reaching LAX I just had to exit terminal one and walk down to terminal two. Not having any checked bags makes it pretty easy to move from place to place. I found the Air Zealand ticket counter, got my ticket, made it through security, and proceeded to wait for 1.5 hours. Upon boarding the 747-400 I found my seat and it was on the aisle toward the middle of the plane. I didn’t have anyone seating to the right me so I was able to spread out a little. Pretty much right after take off they shut the lights off and people started to go asleep. In the row in front of me there was a mother with a baby and small little girl. Surprisingly the baby didn’t cry to much. There were a lot of Australians and New Zealanders on board. One thing I noticed was that they are a pretty helpful crowd. People came up and offered to hold the baby or take the little girl for a walk around the plane. Watched a few movies and got a couple hours of the sleep. The total flying time to New Zealand was about 12.5 hours.

Arrived at the Auckland airport and it was gray and rainy outside so I didn’t get to see much of NZ. I walked around the airport a little since I had about 2 hours to kill. The airport itself is not very big but they have a huge mall you can walk through, most of it is duty free shops. The plane we are flying to Brisbane on is the same one we flew over to NZ on. I got on board and found my seat, it was right across from where I was sitting before, the only difference was I had the whole row to myself. Read for a little while and took about an hour nap.

Arrived at the Brisbane airport. Walked down to the Customs line. I should have asked Luke for his address since they wanted to know where I was staying. Luckily I wrote down Luke’s phone number and that was good enough. A custom agent came up after I finished showing my passport and proceeded to ask me questions and escorted me to get my bags searched. She was very nice and it didn’t take long to search through my two bags, in fact I think it ended up getting me through the security checkpoint quicker. I had nothing to hide :) After repacking my bags I walked out of the terminal and began looking for Luke. About 5 minutes later he found me.
We swung by the place where Luke’s wife Tiffany works to pick her up. It ended up being a bridal shop. Luke youngest daughter Teaghan was also was there. While waiting for Tiffany to finish up, we took a little walk through Stones Corner which is shopping district. While we were out walking Luke had a key made for me so I could come and go from the house.

We ended up going to lunch out at the Hyperdome. The Hyderdome is essentially a mall. After lunch we headed back to their place. I have my own room with a nice size bed and plenty space for all of my stuff :) I managed to stay up to about 9:30pm before deciding that it was late enough and I could go to bed.