My flight from DFW to Brisbane went fine on the grand scheme of things, but it was not without challenges.
When I was first seated, I was on an inner aisle seat (yay!) where every seat around me was taken by a literal toddler (oh no). I’m not against kids on flights, and I have sympathy for parents who have to manage them in a metal tube for hours on end. However, I am not a natural kid person, and being absolutely surrounded by toddlers and babies was… alarming.
The steward (a charming gent who looked vaguely like Takashi Shimura) must have felt A Disturbance in the Force, and swapped me into a different aisle seat, where I had no neighbor to battle for the armrest, and where I had a few feet of distance from the flock of chaos agents. (Thank you again, Minnesota butt-star bear!)
From there, it was 15 hours of constant night, where we lifted from DFW at 10pm on Friday and dropped down in Australia at 6am Monday. (I’ll never get used to the International Date Line.) Every half hour or so, one child or another would start screaming while a mortified parent desperately tried to settle them. Or a toddler would desperately try to escape their seat-prison by running down the aisle. At one point, I felt something moving under my seat; when I looked down, I was alarmed to see that there were two tiny legs sticking out from under the seat cushion.
But do you know what I finally remembered to bring with me for this trip? (And I even had it in my under-seat bag?)
Noise-canceling headphones.
I can usually tune out extraordinary amounts of noise and bother on my own, but by god, I am so happy I brought my extra-expensive bougie over-ear Bluetooth magical sanity-saving electronics.
That said, I didn’t sleep much. We’ll see how that goes later today.
Moving on, we landed in Brisbane without incident. While we waited to exit the plane, our Most Excellent Steward gave us one last gift.
Steward on PA: [deadpan] If you are over 6’2”, when you get to the main door… duck.
[PA clicks off]
[pause]
[PA clicks on]
Steward: Or don’t. Because it’s funny.
When I exited the plane, I was hit by a wall of… was that humidity? And the smell of organic life that wasn’t frozen solid for the winter?
I might be biased coming from a frozen wasteland, but that wall of air that smelled like trees and water gave me an instant wave of joy.
Another thing that gave me joy: Australia’s passport control is ridiculously simple.
Another thing that amused me: when I claimed my luggage from the Dallas flight, I kept not seeing my GIANT ENORMOUS SUITCASE. I kept seeing blue suitcases go by on the carousel, but I kept thinking, “It can’t be mine, for my new suitcase is GIANT and ENORMOUS.” It took me 20 minutes to realize that other people travel with EVEN BIGGER LUGGAGE, and my GIANT ENORMOUS SUITCASE is in reality relatively reasonable and had been cycling round and round the carousel, right in front of me, for ages.
From there, I had some minor misadventures at the Brisbane airport, trying to figure out where I needed to be and where my luggage needed to be, ultimately resulting in the discovery that I can’t check in for my final flight until 8:30am.
Which is why I’m sitting on a sidewalk outside the domestic flight terminal with a pile of luggage and a ragged Dorothy Sayers paperback. At least the weather is lovely!
