where the women glow and the men thunder

We've arrived in Australia!! 20+ hours of travel is never easy, but we decided to pay the piper and use miles to move up to the front of the plane so, it could have been worse. I didn't get a ton of sleep due to the incredible amount of turbulence that plagued almost our entire flight from LAX --> SYD, but I did catch up on 4 movies, so not a total loss.

We arrived around 8:30am and ended up having to wait almost 4 hours before our room was ready. Not exactly cool when you'd give your right arm (your stinky, funky, "been in a plane for 20+ hours" arm) for a shower. We did see Chuy from Chelsea Lately getting in a cab when we arrived though, so that was cool. I would have asked for a picture, but I didn't want him telling some story about a greasy American girl who smelled like a goat approaching him in Australia. According to the bellman, Chelsea had just left the day before.

dang. it.

After we got into a room and freshened up, we met up with El Diablo's friend from Spain who's lived in Sydney for a year. He graciously played tour guide and took us down to the harbor to see the bridge and famous Opera House...





We then made our way to "the Rocks" neighbohood and found a table at a German beer garden to enjoy the glorious Sydney sunshine.

We'd only been out for 4 or so hours, but we were all hitting the wall and decided to head back to the hotel. We popped up to the lounge to hang with the rest of the team and have a couple of nightcaps before crashing.

Amazingly enough, the Wife and I stayed up until 9pm and only woke up once at 5am before sleeping until a more Godly hour. This is a HUGE jet lag accomplishment. Or I was just wiped from only sleeping a whopping 3 hours (in 20-30 minute increments) on the way over. We're currently 15 hours ahead due to you guys springing forward this weekend. Apparently, we'll be 16 again when Sydney does their daylight savings in April. I'm sure we'll struggle for a couple of weeks getting on track, but I'm feeling pretty human-like today and that's better than I expected.

Australia has always been the Wife's #1 location she wanted to visit in all the world and from the moment the landing gear dropped out of the bottom of the plane, she's been estatic...



which in turn makes me estatic. We've got some pretty high expectations this round and so far we're thinking it is going to live up to the hype.

Photos from the day...




p.s.- I've got a lot of catching up to do and had all but abandoned the blog while working at home. Sorry!! I promise to get caught up!!