We Made It!

After a very interesting trip here, we have finally made it!

We will tell you about our trip so far. It started going through the security in Regina. They saw something that looked suspicious in Stephanie's bag so they pulled it over to check (it was just a pack of gum) the lady to a swab of the bag and "found a hit". Apparently the make up in her bag had very minute traces of explosives in it. So Stephanie had to be hand checked. I waited with one of the security guards who thought this was such a great experience for us. While this was going on everyone at our gate was boarding, had boarded and they were now waiting for the two girls that were left so they could leave. We ended up making it on the plane perfectly fine but what a great first experience of the trip.
While on the plane to Vancouver I kept hearing a baby cry but had no idea where it was coming from. Finally near the end of the flight I turned to look to see where it was coming from. When I looked I saw Betty holding a baby. Betty is a lady that works at the Regina Inn. She serves the food in the Down Under Diner for all the employees at work. She told me that she was on her way to Hong Kong. What a small world.

We found it pretty neat that we left Regina at 10:00 am and arrived in Vancouver at 10:25. It definitely didn't feel like 25 minutes though. hahaha. We then waited in the Vancouver Airport until our flight at 6:45 pm. It was a pretty long wait but we found things to keep us busy. This time at security I got pulled aside for a random hand check. Woo! We went to the gate early to try to get seats together since this was a 14 hour flight (we had booked our flights 3 months ago with a travel agent and not one of our flights had us sitting together). We got seats together but when we had got to our seats people were already sitting there and we had the same tickets as us. So us and our non- Aussie accents had to walk around and find a flight attendant to help us. They were all wonderful and treated us very well. I love Air New Zealand. We got our seats and we watched movies and slept. The girl next to us was from New York on her way to New Zealand for a practicum for her schooling (she is going to a vet). This flight did not feel like 14 hours at all. It was wonderful.

We arrived in New Zealand an hour early so we did not have to rush to our next flight. When we passed through security this time there was no hand checks, so I said to Stephanie, "Third times a charm." Not even two seconds after I said that a lady hiding behind a wall pulled Steph to the side for a random hand check. LOL. A bus drove us out to our plane. We did not sit together but that was okay. It was a short trip. I watched The Kite Runner the whole time. Stephanie tried to sleep. We realized once we hit Australia that we never got to experience January 17, 2009. Pretty weird. We have no alibis for January 17, 2009. lol.

When we arrived in Australia there were TONS of people and we had to go and Declare stuff (I had trail mix, Stephanie has been to the farm in the past 30 days.) I didn't have to go through Quarantine like Stephanie did but I still had to go in a line. A LONG LINE. I got to the end of it and security came up to me, looked at my trail mix and stamped my card and I was free to go through the exit (with no line up!) Right away Kristin found me and Stephanie came out shortly after. Kristin drove us out to her place where we currently are for the week. It is called Narrabeen. It is a suburb of Sydney. It is beautiful and not busy at all. The first thing we did when we got here was shower and WALK to the OCEAN!!!! Narrabeen beach. We went into the beautiful, blue, salty water and jumped in and under the waves for quite some time. We went to dry off at the beach and tanned for NOT LONG AT ALL. When we got back to the apartment we started to get pretty red. Now we are really red. Unfortunately, I was on my stomach so I have a hard time sitting down. We also have lots of random patches of white, from where we didn't miss the sunscreen?!!? We bought some SPF 30 Australian sunscreen yesterday. We also went for a walk around the beach and saw beautiful houses, beautiful rock formations and wonderful scenery around the beach and ocean. We went here with Kristin and her roommate Jo. Soon there will be pictures so you can see.

Today the four of us are off to the Blue Mountains. http://www.bluemts.com.au/
It is so great having an Australian friends here. They are trying to take us to the non-touristy places.


Anyways, this is pretty long. Write more later!

Holly (and Steph)