The Great Cyclone Fiasco of 2015

It's about noon on Saturday in Brisbane and I'm sitting here in the comfort of the world's smallest library (no joke, there's one table and around 10 bookshelves) while the rain continues to pour as it's apparently done for the past couple of days.

So in case you missed it, I'm now a temporary Australian citizen. After a delayed flight yesterday, I moved my life into a hostel I'll be staying in until I find an apartment in the city. I know I'm about two weeks behind (I'll get back to you on New Zealand in the coming days), but I did manage to scrape up a few thoughts while waiting yesterday in the Queenstown airport and again from 35,000 feet in the air:

Friday, Feb. 20

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and I’m back to my favorite place in the world—the airport. Normally airports excite me—picture the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart picks up his suitcase and declares that he’s going to cover it in labels from all sorts of exotic places like Italy and Baghdad and you’ve got my feelings about travel in a nutshell. Not today. While I may have a suitcase for 1,001 nights, I don't quite have the mentality or physical energy to carry it any longer. This being my fourth flight this month, I’m a little tired of lugging around my life in a two-piece luggage set and a cripplingly heavy backpack. I’m tired of going through airport security, of taking my shoes off and walking along floors that thousands of dirty feet have walked along and of filling out immigration forms from 35,000 feet in the air. (That being said, I’ve finally mastered writing the date backwards and completing the forms like an expert migrant.) 

We’re in the Queenstown airport. It’s hot, somewhat crowded and from the terminal I’m eye-level with the tarmac and can see the jagged peaks of the Remarkables jutting out in the distance. I don't hate the view. Queenstown’s airport is nice—it’s small, it’s straightforward and the architecture is around 70 percent glass meaning we can get one last look at the beautiful landscape we’ll soon be leaving behind for tropical cyclone Marcia who’s now making her way over Brisbane. 

I’m sad to go. I’ll miss the people who’ve made everywhere in New Zealand feel like a second home, the range of people you meet by sharing small hostel rooms and the dialects you hear while walking down any street, the incredible landscapes that no photograph can ever really capture and the excitement that comes with finding new places and willingly losing yourself in the beauty that surrounds you on all sides.

But I am ready—I’m ready to have a home where I won’t have to live out of a suitcase, a semi-permanent address and a familiarity with the place I will soon be living in for the next few months. I’m going to Australia homeless. I should probably be more nervous than I am—but I’ve learned to love the hostel and I don’t mind staying in one until I find an address to my liking.

So here’s to New Zealand—a place that now holds a very dear place in my heart. A place that showed me one corner of the beauty that can be found in the world, a place that satisfied my inner nature-lover and wandering soul, and a place that showed me that while there may be no place like home, some places are capable of feeling like one—at least temporarily. 

 Queenstown from above

In-flight Thoughts

You know those flights where everything goes wrong? Not the ones you see featured on those god-awful History Channel features about unsurvivable plane crashes and take-off disasters—I’m thinking more along the lines of that video featuring Sir Patrick Stewart imitating every poor bastard’s worst plane nightmares: the bad passenger stereotypes. 

We’re a little over two hours into the flight somewhere over the Tasman Sea. Cyclone Marcia is going strong over Brisbane and St. Lucia’s city council is probably still placing sandbags along the river somewhere in the throes of what I hope is an event somewhat tamer than a Day After Tomorrow scenario. All that’s visible right now is the semi-blinding reflection of a thousand cumulus clouds hovering above the Pacific and a white warmth that feels like it’s capable of tanning my left arm. The inside of the plane is different. 

We’re a bit higher up because of the apparently unexpected turbulence that intermittently tap dances along my nerves and raises my blood pressure to a level that I’m sure would upset my physician. I’ve got the window seat, an unruly backseat neighbor who has a penchants for kicking my seat and a screaming toddler and his clueless parents who can’t quite seem to console him despite multiple attempts at shoving rice cakes and sugar cookies down his throat—hey, I’d probably be crying too. 

This is probably the most stressful of the four flights I’ve been on in the past month. Our plane was a half hour late, we’re expecting one of Shakespeare’s tempests in Brisbane and I still have to worry about whether my ride from the airport to my hostel will be waiting for me, despite an unexpected delay in our schedule. Oh, and baggage—I’m perpetually convinced that the airline is going to misplace my baggage.

So maybe the last three flights were a stroke of good fortune that has now dissolved with the last grains of sand through the hourglass. Here’s hoping the rest of this interminable flight ends on a higher note and that I won’t need a Huck Finn-style river raft to make it to my accommodations in Brisbane. 

Greetings from Straya sans Vegemite

It's about 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday the 11th. I completely missed Tuesday somewhere across the International Date Line and slept on/off (as comfortably as one can on a plane) for 10 of the 16 hours on my flight. I'm currently sitting in a gate at Sydney's airport waiting to board my last flight (yoiks) to Christchurch, New Zealand.

We landed around 6 a.m. Sydney time and had a 13-hour layover--naturally we decided to explore.

Things I've learned in the past 24 hours:

1. Leaving home is hard--but it gets easier once you're up in the air. (Don't worry, Mom and Dad--I still miss you even though I'm very quickly falling in love with the southern hemisphere.)

2. Mondays in February are a GREAT time to fly. I got away with having an aisle seat and no one beside us on both flights from Charlotte to Dallas and Dallas to Sydney, and even had back row reclining seats on the way Down Under. Needless to say, I basically got three seats for the price of one and my own personal bed on the way down here.

3. Rain Man was right--Qantas, definitely, definitely Qantas. They make a 16-hour flight much more bearable. And there is SO MUCH FOOD.

4. When you have a 13-hour layover in Sydney...you explore. There is nothing like that first glance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's unbelievably huge. And there are probably people climbing it. Granted, it's 7 a.m. and I'm amazed by everything because I've just had a strong cup of Australian dark roast. Walk a little farther, shift your vision and boom--the Opera House. It's equally stunning and even more brilliant against the incredibly blue water in the Harbour.

5. Sydney is huge. I mean HUGE. We walked around the Botanical Gardens and took a ferry to Manly Beach and couldn't believe the city's sprawl.

6. The Aussie sun is no joke. It's summer, the sun is high and when you're lugging around a small child on your back (in this case, a 20-lb. backpack), the heat will get to you. I'm WIPED. Also a little sunburnt (oops).

7. The accents! I dig them. You could say moist in an Australian accent (aka the worst word in the English vernacular) and I probably wouldn't hate it.

8. Maybe it's because it's a Wednesday and kids have school/adults are at work, but it's really, really quiet here. I'm not complaining--I'm just surprised. It's definitely not at all what I expected.

9. It's still hard to register that I'm in a new country, continent and hemisphere. Cue the "pinch me I'm dreaming" cliché, but seriously, it's unreal. It's about 11 p.m. yesterday at home and it's hard to believe that my family, friends and fur babies are 8,500+ miles away. For all I know, I may be having an incredibly vivid and pleasant dream from my bed in Chapel Hill.

10. This is the longest, strangest and most non-Wednesday Wednesday I've ever had. Beginning with an airplane breakfast at 3 a.m., adventures in Sydney from 7 a.m. through the early afternoon, and now on to my last flight to New Zealand, I can't say I've ever experienced anything like it--and I wouldn't change any of it. Except buying sunscreen. In hindsight, that would have been smart.

11. There is one Australian airline worker who sings the boarding flight numbers over the intercom. No, it's not philosophical, but when I'm this tired it's the best I've got.

Signing off for now and probably for awhile because I'm not banking on having wifi in NZ. Here's hoping my bag made it safely from America (no, I haven't seen it since Monday), the flight to Christchurch is as pleasant as the past two have been (seriously, how did I get this lucky?) and I remembered to pack my shower shoes. And in case I don't see you...

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

As the time before my departure continues to drain more and more quickly, I've tried something that the teenage iPhone addict I once was would never have thought twice about doing:

I've put the phone down.

Not completely--I still check it a couple of times a day and tend to me more active at night when my family's gone to bed--but while I still have time with my family and friends, I've tried to be better about staying tuned into them instead of the tiny blue screen that's usually within a, perhaps, much too easily accessible location.

The funny thing about putting the phone down is that it's simultaneously both incredibly easy and painstakingly difficult to do. If I'm watching a movie or having a conversation with someone, it's easy to willingly ignore the whole other world that sits at my fingertips--it's almost cathartic. I can almost forget the fact that I have an iPhone and a list of contacts who could be trying to reach me via one of the multiple modes of social media I've (at times, regrettably) chosen to subscribe to.

On the other hand, the news addict/journalist/slightly anxious person in me feels slightly hesitant to be completely removed from technology for fear of being unable to be reached in an emergency or other similar circumstances. While I know these situations are unlikely, particularly when I'm in the presence of my family, I still find that I can't completely remove myself from technology.

Because we are a technological age, it may be difficult to ever completely unglue from technology--unless I spontaneously decide to pull an Office Space and embrace my inner Ron Swanson. But, for now, I guess I'll stop worrying and learn to love the smartphone--in moderation, that is.