Of course, I blame Quinn for the fact that people are now nice and friendly to us, he has a winning way with people.

The flight took off at about the same time Quinn would normally go down for "night nights" so we thought we may have this in our favor.

We did not.

Being in an airplane is nothing like being in a crib, in a silent, dark room. Quinn figured this out fairly quickly and wriggled and writhed for most of the 5+ hour trip. Finally exhaustion took over and he slumped on top of me, like a comatose bag of coffee beans. Which coincided with our descent into LA.

So sleepy, grumpy Q and Maria and I and far too many carry-on bags navigated our way from one terminal in LAX to another on a shuttle bus, then on to customs. Customs was pretty much a horror show of an enormous line up and pat down and we made it into the terminal with about 20 minutes to spare. Fairly nerve wracking.

Qantas are pretty consistently awesome, in my opinion, and despite a wee fricassee with our stroller (it ended up about 5km away from where we needed it when we arrived in Brisbane-forcing us to walk with Quinn and ALL of our carry-on luggage to the enormously overcrowded customs center), the flight was pretty good.

Of course, the flight itself is 12-13 hours and, as it takes off at 11pm Saturday and arrives in Australia at 6am on Monday, for almost all of the passengers it can be counted as 1 good night's sleep.

We and our toddler-carrying neighbors, who I think may have been the only other people on the plane with a "little tacker" (Australian for small child), managed to dispel the "good night's sleep" option for at least the 12-16 passengers anywhere near us. Quinn and Monte fell into a synchronous ritual of melt-downs on a seamless three hourly schedule. Thankfully Quinn was a little more reserved than Monte so his street cred was slightly higher with our disgruntled neighbors.

The food was pretty good (that is coming from Maria who is the toughest critic - being one of those vegetarian types) and the service was cool too. I did get a kick out of a steward with a torch asking us if "everything is alright?" during a Quinn melt-down, which I found particularly interesting, as if he might have some magic way to stop a child from crying?

Finally we arrived and walked the 5km to the customs chaos (see earlier note on "fricassee" regarding our lack of stroller) , then on through the declaration arena where a dog nearly cost us $66,000 in fines for illegally smuggling an apple into the country.

And then on through the doors and there they were, grandma and grandad, overjoyed to see us and us them.

A great start.

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written by  Groovespook on October 20, 2014 from Coominya, Australia
from the travel blog: Australia Family Madness 2014
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Nice post seems very interesting thanks for the post looking forward for more blog.

written by  arena leo on December 2, 2014

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