Flying to Australia August 9

You know the weirdest thing about flying to Australia from NY? You lose a whole day. We're going to leave Saturday evening around 7PM from JFK. We'll be flying west, so the night will just go on and on and on until we arrive in Sydney on Monday morning. I WILL NOT STEP FOOT ON PLANET EARTH THE ENTIRE DAY OF SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2008!!! Isn't that crazy? It's bad enough that you can't get to China today - you can only get there tomorrow. But you can't even get to Australia tomorrow - you can only get there the day after that! It takes 29 hours to get from JFK to Sydney then to connect to Wagga Wagga, NSW. Yes, we have to fly to a place named Wagga Wagga. Then it's a short car drive (on the LEFT hand side of the road) to our hotel in Tumut.

On the plus side, the tickets weren't as expensive as I'd thought they'd be. I got my round trip for $2300. Yes that's an expensive plane ticket, but it is to the totally opposite side of the globe.

Billy's got us booked for a King Suite at theAshton. I emailed them a couple days ago confirming they have broadband internet available in the rooms. Hurray for companies that actually answer their emails. The response was exactly well-written, but at least it was prompt. We're booked through late September, figuring 4-5 weeks for the project at Visy, then another week or two for us to have a proper vacation together before we fly back (only takes 24 hours to fly back east to JFK).

I'm super excited to go to Australia, though the logistics of working with my office people in California will be a pain. I played with the world clock for a bit, and it looks like 8AM in Sydney is 3PM in San Francisco. So as long as I work first thing in the morning I can talk to people on live chats. Most of the conference calls are in the afternoon PST, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. In Brazil, no one was available until noon or 1PM my time, which was fine by me. But I guess I can manage to be a morning person for a few weeks.