Australia or bust!!!

Well we are finally in Australia after an extremely long trip to get over here. We had so many segments that American Airlines couldn’t even check our luggage all the way through to our final destination. Let me give you a brief rundown of what we did. We flew out of Raleigh to Dallas and had a 2.5 hour layover. Then we head to LAX where we had a 5 hour layover. Next, we hopped an Air Pacific flight to Fiji. It was about 10 hours long, but luckily we were in business class living the life of luxury. Once in Fiji we had about a 4 hour layover before we were to catch our flight to Brisbane. Oh…I’m not done!! Once in Brisbane we initially had about a 5 hour layover before we were to catch our final leg of the trip to Cairns. However, bad thunderstorms rolled through the Brisbane area making our layover even longer adding an additional 3 hours. You better believe were were nasty!! We left on a Tuesday and got there on a Thursday. But we skipped over Wednesday all together because we crossed the international date line.

While we were in Dallas we saw Jim Bob Duggar. Do you know who that is? Yeah, me either, but Heidi thought it was funny to see a cast member of 19 Kids and Counting. He was with a bunch of kids, but apparently they weren’t the kids from the show. On our flight from Dallas to LAX we sat behind these 2 little girls. Cute as can be. Turns out, they had just come in second place in America’s Got Talent, but I can’t seem to find them online so who knows if that was even real, but they were sitting up in first class with us.. Those were our only brushes with celebrity. I am very sad that Hugh Jackman was not on our flight back to his homeland. Maybe on the way back..

Once in LA we met up with our friend Justin who was actually supposed to have gone out the day before us, but because of some flight issues he ended up in LA the exact same time that we were there. We met up with him and he hooked us up and got us in to the Admirals Club. We stayed in the Admirals Club up until about 2 hours before our flight to Fiji, but quickly learned we should have allowed 3 hours. We got stuck behind this family of 4 it looked to be who were either planning to move to Fiji or just did not know how to pack light for a vacation. I swear they had about 4 bags each! Therefore it took forever just to get checked in and then we had to go through security all over again. We finally got to our gate….or so we thought. There was nothing about our flight once we got to our gate so I looked at the boarding pass again and we had transposed the numbers of the gate. Our gate was supposed to be 120 and we went to gate 102. Once we realized it we took off running. I felt like I was on the Amazing Race except I didn’t have a back pack…I had a rolly bag! Note to self….if I ever do the Amazing Race never take a rolly bag ( I think a team actually did that one year).

Our flight to Fiji was very nice…our seats reclined back most of the way. I love flying business!!  We ate like Queens!! The food on Air Pacific was really good and the people were really nice. I would totally fly them again.
Once in Fiji we were greeted by some local singers…it was great! Because we were flying business we were able to use their business class lounge where we were able to get a shower. It felt wonderful to be somewhat clean, but of course we had almost another day to go of travel.

When we got to Brisbane we were able to use their business class lounge as well so we hung out there until our flight to Cairns although when we got to our gate that is when we were told that flight was delayed due to bad storms in the area.
We finally made it to Cairns!!! Woohoo….oh but it was not time to celebrate yet. We still had to rent a car and drive to Port Douglas where were would be staying. In the dark….on the opposite side of the road…and the car…..