We fell through the clouds to Oz

We experienced time travel for the first time, losing Saturday completely during our 12 hour trans-Pacific flight. After some rigamarole with bags, changing gates, and delays, we finally boarded our Jet Star flight from Auckland to Sydney. It was a pretty uncomfortable flight, but the sky below was a hilly cumulus cloudscape. As we descended into Sydney, we couldn’t see anything as we dropped through these beasts of vaporous mass, and then, suddenly, we broke through, and the Sydney Opera House was just outside my window. There were spotlights of sun breaking through the thick cloud layers, like mother nature saying, “hey, check this out.”

When we got to Sydney, we met Ray and Chris at the airport exit, grabbed some quick Indian food for dinner and headed to the train station via taxi. I watched Chris get into the front seat on the left side and my tired brain was confused momentarily. The 3 hour train ride from Sydney to Wickham seemed endless, but Jenny warmly welcomed us, and we set up beds and got to sleep around midnight.

We spent our first morning in Wickham (a suburb of Newcastle) at Chris and Jenny’s place, eating vegan mango pancakes with jam and drinking delicious espresso, while Dylan quizzed Chris on all of the slang terms in the back glossa

ry of our Australian tour book. Chris, not surprisingly, being native to this land, got all but the most obscure of the terms spot on. We spent the rest of the time playing with their “tin lid,” Wolfie. Ray, Wolfie, and Chris slept in while Jenny, Dylan, and I walked to the market to get some supplies for the next few days before the tour begins. We had a pretty lazy day, hanging with the kiddo, eating, and eventually got to practicing in the afternoon.

Here’s some Aussie slang we learned today:

fair dinkum - the real thing, true blue

crack on - make a pass at, hit on

cark it - die, turn into a carcass