Destination Down Under
It's finally happening. Finally! The plan for our trip to Australia this coming midwinter, early next year, 2020, is officially . . . official. We have a lot left to book, but the most key and the most pressing things are now booked, as of last night. Air travel to Sydney. Air travel back home from Adelaide (via Sydney). Both directions we have a U.S. layover in San Francisco. And via Hotels.com, I have reserved five nights at a hotel in Sydney, within ten minutes walking distance to where the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade will take place.
It's happening. I can't tell you how much of a relief this is, after seemingly endless discussions about it for about two years, and after postponing it a year when we first aimed at going to Gay Mardi Gras in 2019. But, I just had too many other travels planned for 2019, and in the end I conceded it made sense to shift Australia to 2020. I already had the Toronto / Niagara Falls / Syracuse trip (with Danielle) this past spring, and Denver (with Shobhit, to visit Sara) just last month in August, and Las Vegas (with Danielle, again) coming this coming Sunday. Three trips already with air travel in each case; I even canceled this year's usual spring trip to see Mom and Bill. I promised her I would not skip the spring visit next year. I don't think I have any plan to fly anywhere in 2020 besides the trip to Australia, though. I'm pretty sure out-of-state trips in 2020, aside from Australia, will be confined to the two regular trips to see Mom in Idaho, one in probably June or July and one in December. I suppose a weekend trip to Portland at some point remains in the cards, but that barely counts and again will not necessitate air travel.
Anyway. We've basically decided the AAA travel agency service did not particularly well service our needs. The lady who came back with a suggested travel itinerary had us with a layover in Los Angeles on the way there that was all of forty-five minutes. The hell? That's cutting it close even for domestic travel. If that flight out of Seattle were delayed even half an hour, we could have wound up missing a 15-hour flight out of Los Angeles, and that could really fuck us up. I don't imagine there are flights to Sydney every hour. Not even from L.A.
So, after visiting Heather at AAA two Saturdays ago and exchanging a couple of emails last week, Shobhit and I finally actually sat down last night, right after I biked home from work, and set about looking up flight itineraries on our own. We spent at least a couple of hours doing this, but actually booked flights in the end so I found it totally worth the effort. We did comparison pricing with websites like orbitz and expedia and with a couple other airline websites like Delta, and in the end we booked exclusively (for these flights, anyway) through Qantas Airlines, apparently Australia's largest airline by fleet size. (They seem to pronounce it "Quantas" so their omission of the u in spelling does irritate me but I guess I'll get over it.)
So this is what we have actually booked as of now. Two-hour flight from Seattle to San Francisco 3:30 in the afternoon Monday February 24, landing SFO 5:35. Three-hour layover has our flight out of San Francisco leaving for Sydney at 8:30 pm. That flight lasts fourteen hours and 35 minutes, putting us in Sydney at 11:05 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday February 25, but which Australian Eastern Time will be 6:05 a.m. Wednesday February 26.
Try to wrap your head around that. I have no idea how I'm going to deal with sleep. Try to sleep as much as I can on the plane, I guess. I hear the adjustment is a lot easier going west than returning, which makes sense since even though the date will be different than expected, it will still be morning when we get there. It'll just be five hours earlier in the morning than it feels like it should be.
I am quite happy to have booked the hotel for five nights in Sydney as well, because I have long been afraid of waiting too long and then finding everything within the vicinity of Gay Mardi Gras all booked up. But this 32-story hotel I found on Hotels.com is only about half a mile away from the parade route. The parade is on Leap Year Day, Saturday February 29, and we'll thus have three full days to enjoy Sydney prior to that: visit the famed Sydney Opera House; do the Bridge Climb (which I may have to do myself, which is fine); spend some time at nearby beaches. We'll also have a full day in Sydney after Mardi Gras.
What we otherwise have booked as of now is all of our flights back, by that point returning from Adelaide, and which will involve three separate flights: 2-hour flight out of Adelaide at 12:35 pm local time Monday March 9 (which is actually 7:05 am March 8 Pacific Time); three-hour layover in Sydney before taking off 5:55 pm Sydney time, for a thirteen-and-a-half-hour flight to San Francisco, landing 1:25 pm . . . Monday March 9. Time travel backwards! Then, a roughly two-hour layover in San Francisco before taking off from there 3:30 and landing back in Seattle at 5:30 pm.
The weirdest part about traveling home from Adelaide is that throughout that trip, we'll be on land in three different time zones. It's confusing enough contemplating the massive time difference between Seattle and Sydney (simplest way to look at it: go forward one day, but backward seven hours; or if you're in Sydney, then go backward one day, but forward seven hours). But, there is a half-hour time difference between Adelaide and Sydney -- a weird local anomaly that dates back over a century and has to do with wanting extra daylight for sport practices -- and this has made inputting all my flight durations on Google Calendar challenging. For my main Google Calendar, I have input all takeoffs and landings exclusively in Pacific Standard Time, so at least the hours of duration are show accurately. I have separate calendar items using the calendar I usually use exclusively for Shobhit's work shifts, and those are input reflecting what will be local Australia times while we're there.
Google Maps will probably go all wonky with this while I'm there, because I have noticed automatic shifts of things I had on my calendar when I have traveled to other time zones. So, we'll see.
Anyway! These are the things we still need to book.
1. Instead of flying from Sydney to Melbourne for a two-night stay on March 2, we're looking at a 10-hour train ride. We figure a 2-hour flight would involve a lot of time-taking transit travel to and from airports and we have to get to the airport two hours early anyway, so even with flying we lose the day to travel anyway. Presumably on a train at least it's more comfortable and we have the chance to observe passing scenery we have never seen. Also, Uncle David had some time ago highly recommended a train tour that goes from Adelaide straight north to Darwin on the north coast, with a stop at the famous Uluru / Ayers Rock in the middle of the country. Shobhit and I found that to be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible; we decided to shelve that idea for a possible return to Australia in a few years. For now, this is the train ride we're looking at going for instead, which would save us a couple hundred bucks compared to flying.
2. Two nights hotel booking in Melbourne, March 2-4. There's no major even we're aware of comparable to Gay Mardi Gras at the time, so we figure we have plenty of time to wait before booking this.
3. Probably we still need to book a flight from Melbourne to Adelaide, on March 4. We considered another train ride, but have been surprised to find only one such option and it departs only two days of the week and not on the day we want. It appears flights from Melbourne to Adelaide are pretty reasonably priced anyway. In the absence of a train option the alternate choice we found from Melbourne to Adelaide is a roughly 10-hour bus ride, which is comparable in duration to the train ride from Sydney to Melbourne, and depending on how comfortable the bus is and how nice the scenery is, we might just go for that and save money on air fare here as well. I emailed Uncle David and Mary Ann last night with details we have so far and asked them for advice on this, to see if they thought the scenery between Melbourne and Adelaide was worth taking a bus for instead of flying. (Just for comparison: Sydney and Melbourne are 444 miles apart, which is close to equivalent distance between Seattle and Helena, Montana [489 miles]; by contrast, Melbourne and Adelaide are 406 miles, which is close to equivalent distance between Seattle and . . . Missoula, Montana [394 miles]. Turns out, actually, Melbourne is quite close to equivalent distances between either Sydney or Adelaide, further south but otherwise in the center between them.)
4. One night stay on Kangaroo Island, off the coast of Astralia near Adelaide. Our stay in Adelaide will otherwise be five nights, March 4-9. Only four of those would actually be staying with Uncle David and Mary Ann; one of those nights, still to be determined, will be on Kangaroo Island. The more I think about it, the more I'd like to make Kangaroo Island closer to the beginning of our stay within South Australia, so that our last days before leaving the country to come home can be comparatively chill without a lot of running around all over the place.
5. We also nixed the idea of a guided tour to Kangaroo Island out of Adelaide and back, and plan to rent a car for two or three days there, so we can just drive ourselves to the ferry and on to the island. This both saves us money (the tour packages are stupid expensive; granted, we haven't looked at car rental costs yet) and, perhaps more importantly, offers us far greater freedom for exploration of the island on our own time.
None of these feel anywhere near as pressing to get done as soon as possible, though, as just getting flights to and from Australia broadly speaking booked, which gives me a much greater sense of this trip definitively happening; and booking a hotel near Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras before all nearby hotels are booked up. I understand this event to be world famous and so I assumed the closer we got to February the more difficult this would be. Either I'm off base on that, or we just managed to do it early enough. Because finding a reasonably priced hotel nearby proved kind of surprisingly easy and simple, actually. I'm still glad and relieved to have it done.
I'm the one paying for all these travel costs, although I haven't technically yet. Shobhit suggested he pay with his Costco credit card, since that gives 3% back. Once he's got it all totaled up (which is going to include things like online transaction fees and maybe currency conversion fees), I'll just write him a check. Right now I have $2000 saved in my budgeting for this vacation, and already travel costs have far exceeded that, in excess of $3000 probably. But! I also have $900 saved for other travel expenses such as the trip to Las Vegas this coming weekend, and I don't expect to spend but about half that amount. That will still keep me well short of a total in excess of three thousand dollars, but it will help keep me from being that much more short of it. And, I will continue setting money aside every paycheck between now and then, plus the couple thousand more I already plan to use from cashed-out vacation time at the end of the year -- which was precisely where the two thousand I have earmarked right now came from, from last year's vacation time. I think we're pretty well set to be all right to cover the costs of this massive vacation by the time it actually gets here. We're on it!
I just got back from lunch with Karen down at the Six-Seven at the Edgewater Hotel, our first lunch since August 22 -- over a month ago -- due both to the usually scheduled lunch earlier this month having to be canceled due to scheduling conflicts on her end, and then the lunch we had scheduled for last Friday had to be postponed to this week because she was sick.
She appeared to be all better today, though! And boy did we have a lot to talk about, due to some pretty major news in both our lives since we last got together. We started with my big news, which you just spent all that time reading -- the booking of Shobhit's and my travel to Australia.
But, then we shifted to what I've been expecting since last week to talk to her about at this lunch: her Seattle Times profile in the Pacific NW Magazine's annual "Architecture Issue," focusing on Karen's career as a disability consultant on architecture projects. It's an awesome, justifiably flattering piece that first ran online two Sundays ago, September 15, but which I did not know about until Susan, of all people, alerted me to it last Wedensday. This means the article was out there for three days and I had no idea! Because of course Karen did not go out of her way to tell everyone in the world (as I absolutely would have), because she is too modest (which I am not).
So, of course, I posted about it myself on Facebook and Twitter that very morning last Wednesday. A quick look at Karen's Facebook page indicated several other people already posting about it and tagging her, which placed the link in her feed several times over without her ever having to do it herself. (She did post a link on her own just this past Saturday, to friends only so if you're not her Facebook friend you won't see that post, but in it she expressed sincere gratitude for all the support.)
I was pretty eager to talk to her about it today, though. I had lots of questions, not least of which was whether she felt the article a) represented her as an individual well and fairly; and b) represented disability issues well and fairly (yes and yes, she says); what it was like to do the interview itself with the reporter there (Karen had some fun details about the writer's process, such as all her questions written on separate tabs of a Post-IT notes stack that had not been separated, but which she took off to stick to where she wrote notes with the answers she gave in her notebook); and how often people still stop to tell her they read the article and to compliment her on it. We have long been regulars at this Six-Seven restaurant, and two staff members came by soon after we arrived to compliment her on the article. And it's been out for a week and a half!
Surely she's been getting this multiple times daily since the article came out. Apparently even her dentil hygienist mentioned it to her this morning. Anyway, even though the piece is fairly long (17 pages filling up the entire print issue of Pacific NW Magazine, according to Karen), it is very well written and absolutely worth reading in their entirety. Granted I'm biased as I know Karen and am fond of her, but I really think I would have read that piece with interest even if I didn't know her. It talks about the Space Needle renovation! Among other things, of course.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun catching up with her and now I really need to get some actual work done today.
[posted 1:40 pm]