Yes, people, as threatened, I have finally gone overseas. Woo! :)

I'm currently at the parents' place here in New Jersey, and recovering from what would have to be one of the longest and most exhausting Tuesdays in history. Not only did I spend about 20 hours flying (13 hrs on one flight, then 6 on the other) but there was also the added fun of sitting around in airports at Sydney, San Francisco and Newark.

Tuesday started out as many other first-day-of-travel days have done: sleep deprived due to staying up till 4 am packing. (Speaking of which, wow I had to cut out a lot of stuff I wanted to take. Even so, I think I packed too much.) But I figured it didn't really matter since I could sleep on the plane, right? Technically, yes. In practice, well, not so much.

Due to me wandering a little at the airport and seriously underestimating the time to get through immigration and to gate 60, I ended up getting there as one of those people being paged to rock up for the plane. (I was there half an hour before the scheuled take-off time, so I don't know why they were already paging me, exactly.) And since my boarding pass was one of those "best seat available" ones, on a 400 seat plane with me being one of the last 5 cattle-class passengers to board, I got a damn crappy seat. Row 54 (yes, they do go up that high), one of the middle seats with at least one person to crawl over whenever I wanted to get out. Good ol' Economy. There's nothing else like it to make you feel more like a battery animal.

Anyway, I was seated between a self-absorbed 40yo-ish couple on my left, and some exceedingly untalkative moderately cute 25yo guy on my right. I tried making conversation a few times with the guy on my right but got fairly minimal answers and gave up in the end. Oddly, simply because we were of roughly the same age, one of the flight attendants thought we were married.

The main good thing about Untalkative Guy was that he tended to get up every 2 hours or so to stretch his legs, so I got to get up fairly regularly to stretch my legs. And what did I do in such a confined space as a plane to stretch my legs? Well, after going up one aisle and back down the other a few times, it was getting kind of dull so I did some Charlestons. 20's and 40's. Think about that for a moment. Imagine you're on a cramped plane with 400 other people and you see a loony up the back bobbing up and down as she kicks her feet around a lot. No wonder people gave me some funny looks. :)
But I'm sure the guy who saw me doing the Shim Sham must have thought that there was something seriously wrong with me. At least with 20's Charleston it kind of looks like stretching. With the Shim Sham I probably looked like I had something stuck on the bottom of my shoes. :) Or that my feet were possessed. Whatever. :) Swing is good for getting the circulation going in one's feet during long flights. I heartily recommend it.

I tried sleeping, but being in one position for lengthy periods of time doesn't really promote it so much. Also, the lack of a window or friendly shoulder to lean my head against didn't help, either. Ended up dozing for about an hour or two before being fed breakfast at 9am San Fran time (2 am Sydney time).... and herded off the plane an hour later just when i was getting particularly sleepy.

So, there I was, the first day of my 6 months of fun-filled travels, wondering why people were being so untalkative. Some might say this could have been to do with the fact that I was being a weirdo making funny kicking gestures at the back of the plane, but I was kind of disappointed, regardless. Until some nice American guy started chatting with me as we were on a travellator at SFO. Apparently he hadn't been on one before and he needed to tell someone. :) I suppose they are pretty cool the first time you go on one, what with it feeling like you're walking super-fast and all. :)
He'd just come back to the states after his first trip overseas, which happened to be to Sydney for the Mardi Gras. I lost him when we went through Customs and Immigration, but it was nice to chat with someone after being trapped between not-so-friendly people for 13 hours beforehand.

Flight number 2, although being much shorter was more tiring for me because I was already pretty tired after the first one. And since it was a much smaller plane there was only one aisle to move around in, and thus my leg-stretching was much shorter.

Flying across the states was pretty interesting. I was hoping to see the Grand Canyon, but either we went around it, or I slept through it. I did a lot of dozing on that flight. Pretty much whenever I closed my eyes I'd doze for a few minutes. We went over a mountain range which was all white and snowy, I think they were probably the Rockies. And then there were a few massive lakes. I'm talking HUUUUUUGE. The plane was going at like 1000kph, but it still took us like 10 mins to cross the damn thing. I got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of crossing one of them and when I got back it was still under us. Then, as we got closer to Newark the views started getting really pretty because it was getting close to sunset. At one point the clouds were all odd and scattered and I was thinking it looked as though some giant naughty puppy had torn a massive couch cushion to shreds and strewn the cottonbally goodness all over world.
The last half hour of the flight was particularly pretty. The sky was slightly cloud-filled, and the sunlight shining through it was all orange and red as it got low over the horizon. You could see reflections of deep crimson off the tops of various buildings in New Jersey. There was a Manhattan skyline in the distance on the other side. I can remember thinking I should take a photo. So sleepy. Several photos. So very very sleepy. Need to get my camera out of my bag. Too sleepy. Don't want to move. And then we landed a few minutes later and all the pretty views were gone. So, no photos just yet.

Came off the plane feeling pretty much like a boiled vegetable. Thankfully airports are frequently designed for the boiled vegetable to navigate in, and I was able to find my way out to the baggage collection carousel with minimal hassles, and then was found shortly afterwards by a familiar-looking parental. All was well. Walked up to the car on the passenger side before realising that it was actually the driver's side here in the states.
Got home, chatted a little, but mainly was soooooo glad that somebody had invented the shower and beds. There's really nothing like a good lie-down after 20 hours of flying. This bed is sloped and kinda hard, but anything beats a seat in an airplane.

Thus ends my first travel-related entry. Stay tuned for further tales from the mind of Lish as she is unleashed upon the world.