Travel Recap, part 2

Here I am, already way behind on sharing what we've been up to so far! But here's the rest of the travel recap at least.

The next leg was the hard one. We were already totally exhausted, and our flight didn’t depart until 11 p.m., with a 15-hour flight time. Fortunately, though we were last-minute adds to the flight (since we were a full day behind our original itinerary at this point), a very wonderful lady on the flight traded places with us so that we could have two full rows instead of a row, a pair, and a single. People like this make the world go ‘round.

Good thing I didn't need to get up too many times, because this was my life for most of the flight.

Here’s how the flight went: Koa fell asleep in the stroller before we even boarded the plane. (Our stroller! Another blessing! We were going to send it in the car but discovered that wasn’t allowed—so we had it for all these adventures, which was so necessary when Koa started getting sick and tired). Ammon fell asleep in Brice’s arms. Coriel and Addra were dead on their feet. So I sat between Koa and Coriel, and Brice sat with Ammon and Addra. Coriel flopped all around for many hours, sometimes into my lap, sometimes on my shoulder—it was funny and a little sad watching her try to get comfy, but at least she was getting some sleep!). Koa too flopped around a bit. Predictably, he threw up again. I had these fancy, wonderful Medline barf bags that Dawn had given me (bless you!), and... I won’t go into more details here, but let’s say they were wonderful but not quite perfect when you can’t get the kid to hold still. Anyway, we got that taken care of. Ammon slept a bunch, Addra too I think (I was too full of the other kids to notice). Brice and I slept very little.

But we all watched a lot of movies! Eventually it was starting to feel like morning to us, so we got movies galore. (Okay, I think it was only 3-ish, but it felt like more.)

I watched Christopher Robin with Koa. At least until we both fell asleep during it, then I kept waking up and feeling like I hadn’t really missed anything. It was EXACTLY as I would have predicted from the first three minutes or so. So yes it was sweet, but it didn’t do much for me.

Our caravan at the Sydney Airport. The luggage trolley behind Coriel was mine.
(Also, I dumped this pic here because my internet decided to make it annoyingly
difficult to move photos. So this is where I gave up.)

Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse! I watched this one alone. I realize I’m really late to this party, but I really enjoyed it. I had heard good things about it, so I went into it hopeful but uncertain. Well, it was just so much fun to watch. Very different in terms of style, made fun of itself and the genre just a bit, pretty good storyline. Totally worth the watch, in my opinion. Seriously. I really enjoyed it.

I watched How to Train Your Dragons 3 with Coriel. My kids have loved the others, as well as the TV series, so she was very excited to see this. I thought it was fine, a fitting end. But I wasn’t super invested in the franchise, so it didn’t thrill me to pieces. Still, it was fun to watch with the kiddo.

And then, finally! We got off the plane at the end of a very long flight. Oh, it was so good to finally be on land again, not feeling like a sardine. Customs wasn’t terrible, and it was a delight to find that luggage trolleys didn’t require payment for use. Which was great, because we had three luggage trolleys. Brice and I each pushed one (with Ammon in the basket on Brice’s trolley), Coriel pushed one, and Addra pushed Koa in the stroller. We were quite the caravan!

Brice had (brilliantly) booked us at the airport hotel. And when I say “airport hotel,” I mean that it was literally across the street from the airport exit. We even got to keep our luggage trolleys with us. Anyway, we checked in, got our luggage to our room (using the elevator three separate times because we couldn’t fit much on it), crammed in the luggage (seriously, we could barely move around it in the hotel room, but at least we didn’t have to take it off the trolleys again!), and got ready to explore Sydney for the day.

Why didn’t we just go straight from Sydney to Alice? Because there is exactly one flight from Sydney to Alice per day. We couldn’t have made it through customs with all of our luggage, then gotten from the international terminal to the domestic terminal and gotten re-checked in, etc., all in the 1.5-ish hours that we would have had. So a lot of people take the one-day layover in Sydney. I’ll do a different post about our day in Sydney, with pics. Spoilers: It involved a zoo, an aquarium, some pretty tasty food, and some throwing up!

We went to bed soooo early and slept a little too late. Well, we didn’t think it was too late. But it turns out we didn’t account for how long it would take to...

* Get all our luggage downstairs

* Wait for the shuttle bus between the international terminal and the domestic one

* Ride on the shuttle

* Get off the shuttle and find a way to haul all our luggage (no longer on trolleys, alas!) into the airport

* Skip breakfast

* Check in

* Discover that the government travel system hadn’t correctly dealt with all our extra luggage, so we had to figure out exactly how much to pay

* Wait while the very helpful, very stressed-out desk agent had to print and reprint our luggage tags because the printer kept jamming and shutting down

* Run Run RUN! through the airport as they were calling our names for final boarding

So that was exciting. But we did indeed make it to the plane. We were the last ones on, and they were clearly waiting for us, but hey, at least we made it.

This leg of the trip was easy peasy, minus the fact that by this point I was feeling sick to my stomach. Spoiler: There is no throwing up in this section of the story! But I did hold a barf bag in my lap the whole time, in between a little bit of dozing. Actually, now that I think about it, I have no idea whether this leg of the trip was easy. I was too busy either napping off the stomach suffering or deciding if I needed to run to the bathroom or just use the little portable bag. But again, no throwing up in the end, and by the time we landed, I was feeling much better.

We got off the airplane straight onto the tarmac, which was pretty exciting for the kids (oh, who am I kidding? I enjoyed it too). Then we were greeted by three of Brice’s co-workers inside the airport. They were undoubtedly showered (unlike us), awake and perky (unlike us), and full of brain power (unlike us). They were also really nice and helpful, and they picked up our luggage easy peasy and helped us get loaded into a shuttle van.

Then they drove us to our new home!!!! And finally our travels were over and our Alice Springs adventures were beginning. And that will be a new post too.