I'm baa-aaa-ck!

I arrived in Canberra early afternoon yesterday, July 7th. The day after I wrote my last blog post, my parents and I decided to book my plane ticket and then figure out housing. We knew that I was going to leave from our family vacation in North Carolina, instead of driving back up to Michigan just to leave in a couple more days. We had also heard from my mom's PhD mentor's friend, who works at the ANU and said that she could find me a place to stay temporarily if I couldn't find a place before I got here.

The next couple of weeks were crazy busy and about a week and a half ago, I emailed a bunch of people on the ANU classifieds that were looking for someone to take over their lease. I got one email back and started emailing her back and forth trying to work out details. Then she told me that she didn't pass one of her units and wouldn't be moving out. I was lucky that someone else had emailed me that very day. I was having difficulties communicating with the first girl, you could tell that English was not her first language, but the second girl gave me a lot of helpful information. I talked to unilodge, the company for on campus housing, and the day before I left, I was able to send in all of the paperwork so that I'll have a place to stay.

Yes, that's in future tense for a reason, I don't get to move in until 10 July, because the girl is still living there. My boyfriend's mom's friend is letting me stay at their house until I can move in, but I'll get to that in a bit.

The week before I left, my family (my parents, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and niece) all took a road trip down to North Carolina to visit my oldest sister and brother-in-law. We go almost every year for the week of the Fourth of July. We had a lot of fun all together for my last week in the USA and we even got professional pictures taken of our family.

On the fifth, we went to Raleigh to drop me off at the airport before the rest of the northern bunch headed back home. It was hard leaving my family, and especially my nephew, Austin, and niece, Adrianna. Adrianna doesn't really understand that I'll be gone for a long time because she's only three, but I know that Austin, who is 5, does understand. He kept hugging me and telling me that he was going to miss me and wanted to come to Australia so that he could visit me. (In addition to all of the times he says that he wants to go to visit my boyfriend, Rohan. That's kind of a daily occurrence, or at least it was when I was staying with them.) It broke my heart when my sister, Jillian, texted me that while watching me go through security, Austin said to her, "I'm going to miss my aunt so much! Is it okay if I cry, mom?" How could that not make you want to cry, too?

My flights went pretty well. From Raleigh, I went to JFK in New York. JFK was a nightmare trying to get through. Every other time I had been going to/from Australia, I had been to Detroit, then Chicago, then LAX, so it was my first time trying to get around JFK. I had to find my way from the American Airlines terminals to the Qantas terminals and when I asked for directions, I wasn't sure what the people were saying. Somehow I managed to get there, which involved a bunch of ups and downs and taking an airtrain. Luckily I had plenty of time before my next flight.

My next one went to LAX for a quick two hour stop while they refueled and cleaned up the plane before heading to Sydney. I was never on the same plane for two legs of the trip before, so it was nice not needing to run around LAX looking for my next terminal.

Next, I got to Sydney. When you travel internationally to Sydney, there's this store that you go in right before heading to customs, and there were these people dressed up as a kangaroo and a koala. It was hilarious, but I didn't have my camera out and couldn't be bothered trying to find it. I made it through the customs line and then got my bags to have them checked again. The baggage claim was relatively painless as both bags got there, and pretty quickly, too. I was one of the lucky ones that got a dog to sniff my luggage. At least it was a cute one! (ok, all dogs are cute, but this was a beagle and since my dog is a beagle mix, they have a special place in my heart.)

I then went to drop my bags off again and went through security. Again I was one of the lucky ones to get randomly selected to have some stick thing swiped through my carry-on bags. I'm guessing it was to check for explosive powders or something. I was just lucky that it wasn't like last time I went to Australia and barely made it to my flight to Perth on time. And I do mean barely. Some people from my flight from LAX who were supposed to be on my flight to Perth, didn't make it. After security, I went to wait for the bus to take us to the domestic terminals. It was pretty quick. My boarding pass didn't have a gate number on it, since I got it at JFK, but I found the screen with the list of all the flights and luckily I found it right away.

I headed over to the gate and waited for a pretty long time. I had a four hour layover, but with customs I didn't think it'd be that long. I guess customs went a lot quicker than I thought it would. I watched two or three flights before me head off to Canberra, but since I had checked luggage and someone picking me up, I didn't bother asking if I would be able to move my flight up.

The flight right before mine was delayed because the plane got in later, and wasn't supposed to board until the same time that my flight was supposed to board. Luckily, they decided to board my flight first since it was were it was supposed to be. The earlier flight was somewhere else and the passengers would need to board a bus or something to get over there. This plane was pretty small. Instead of just going through the gate right on to the plane, we had to go down the stairs and then climb stairs into the plane. It was only four seats across. The only flying that I've done is to/from Australia and once I went to Spain, so I've never been on a small plane before. It was only about a half hour flight to Canberra and wasn't a bad trip at all.

When I got off the plane and back to the airport, I met up with Craig and Jo, Rohan's mum's friends who are taking me in for a few days. I am so grateful for them. They are super nice and took me back to their house. They have two kids, Shannon, 17, and Kyle, 13. They also have a dog, who is quite fond of me.

When I got back from the airport, I sent a quick email off to my parents to let them know that I got here safely and went to shower. Then I checked my facebook, which takes a long time after a family trip when my sister, Jacki, posts pictures. We like to take pictures in our family. I then got tired and took a nap before dinner. Jo's parents come over every Saturday for dinner, and last night was no exception. They were really nice too. After dinner, we watched some tv together. I kept petting their dog, and she loved it, complete with the hind leg scratch thing when I rubbed her belly.

I tried to stay up pretty late so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back asleep. It kind of worked, but I still woke up in the middle of the night, however, I quickly fell back asleep. I also didn't want to wake up too early, but the sun was up and I wasn't really that tired anymore. Oh well.

On a side note, I don't really know my unilodge address for sure yet, so I can't post that. I'm also not sure if my old phone will work or not. I don't have credit, so I can't make calls and my mom tried to call and said it didn't work. I'll keep you posted when I find out about the phone situation and/or my postal address.