This actually happened between July 13th-16th (never seeing the 15th due to time change)
I know it's long, but a lot happened lol
After staying the night in Detroit with the lovely Nicole Bartlett, it was time to take me to the airport and say our goodbyes, who would have thought the adventures would literally start before we even left!? After checking in and meeting up with Stephanie, Lauren, Amy and finally Katie we soon found out that our plane was delayed an hour. This wasn't that big of a deal until not too much longer they announce that it has now been delayed another hour and that our plane would be landing at 9:50 and our connecting flight was at 10:00. We then spent a lot of time talking to people at the desk trying to figure out how we are gonna get there if we miss our flight...which was very likely. At one point they told us that the soonest they could get us there was Monday which would have been a whole three days late!! However after calling our travel agent we managed to have a better plane. Now the plane is to stay the night in Dallas, fly from Dallas to Vancouver, then Vancouver to Sydney and arrive a day late But regardless we are going to attempt to make this connection.
The plan was for me to get off the plane as fast as I could to get to our next flight and attempt to have them hold it for the rest of us. The man that sat behind Lauren and I was very helpful and showed us a map of the airport and how to take the tram to our next gate. I swear though that everyone on the flight knew that we were going to Sydney and were cheering us on and there were even a group of older ladies in the back that had a prayer session for Katie (who did very well on the plane for being so scared! haha). Unfortunately however, even after all of this our flight didn't land until 10:15 and by the time I rushed of the plane they already had our new itinerary of flights printed out for us. We were stuck in Dallas.
We were given a hotel to stay in, some 2 food vouchers and transportation to and from the airport, but they were reluctant to let us have our baggage. We tried to catch the shuttle that was suppose to come pick us up but after waiting 20min in 102 degree weather we called back only to find out that they weren't gonna come. So, we caught a taxi and payed $32 just to get there, in hopes that they will reimburse us later. The hotel wasn't too bad but nothing special; they ended up giving us all our own room with two double beds (with the exception of lauren who ended up with two boarding passes), but we all ended up bunking together leaving Amy with her own room. We did get lucky though and the hotel offered breakfast in the morning and a shuttle for us to take back to the airport.
Once the shuttle dropped us off, I quickly realized that I had either left my purse at the hotel or it was still on the van that was driving away from us. After calling the hotel we found out that it was left there on the couch and that we would have to wait for the shuttle to come back at 10 if i didnt want to pay over $60 for a taxi to get it. This didn't seem like too big of a deal since we didn't have any baggage to check in and our flight wasn't till 11:25. However, we had to take a tram to another gate to meet her, she was 15min late, we had to take the tram back, and the guy that checked me in took forever because he was trying to make sure our baggage was going to arrive with me. This all made us a little worried or at least Amy, Lauren and I. Katie was sort of freaking out so I told her and Stephanie to go ahead and check in while we took care of all of this. Though we were pushing it pretty close, we managed to get their with about 5min before they started loading passengers.
This flight wasn't too bad, I spent most of my time relaxing and reading my book Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins which I did not want to put down! Being on this flight was reassuring that we were going to make the next one since we had a 10hr layover in between this flight and our flight to Sydney. We debated leaving the airport to go explore a little bit, but after all that had happened we decided to play it safe and stay where we knew we would make our flight. After eating, we found the gate that we would be at and pretty much made it home for the next 8hrs. Luckily there was free wireless, so some of us were able to skype our families and kill time with that and facebook of course. This day ways quite long, and after having to deal with 2 different time zones already I had lost all track of what time and day it was.
Eventually we were able to board our flight, but because we were all squeezed on at the last minute and the flight was full, none of us were able to sit together and all had middle seats. I was sat between a 10yr old little boy and an older women. The little boy, Marcus, was quite the talker, and I found to be quite intelligent. He was telling me all about his dad's kickball league, his video game "scribblenaut", and what things that are different in Australia like our Jelly is actually Jell-o to them. After we were fed some chicken and rice stuff (which was actually not too bad), Marcus fell asleep and I read my book a while but eventually settled to watch a movie "The Lincoln Layer", which I told Adam I would watch first if it was one of the options, and I'm glad I did because it was a great movie. I did however have to stop it a little over halfway through do to the fact that I kept dozing off. I tried to sleep a few times on the plane, but I really have a hard time doing so when traveling. I also ended up watching "Unknown" with Liam Neeson and that was also a pretty good movie. I really wanted to finish my book on the flight but between movies, attempting to sleep, and Marcus talking I unfortunately didn't quite get there. One thing I found really odd was the fact that they had to spray some sort of insecticide on the plane before we were allowed to get off the flight.
Overall the flight really didn't seem to be all that long, especially since our original flight was suppose to be over 20hrs long. Instead, after about 16hrs we had FINALLY arrived at our destination in Sydney...only to soon find that our luggage had not
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