Down Under, Day 1

Sitting in the lobby of the Melbourne Westin, an ornately decorated hotel that would look right at home in any city of the world, it's a little stunning to consider how it was by my recollection yesterday that I left Connecticut, but in reality it was close to 55 hours ago. Time flies when you cross the international date line.

Melbourne, The World's Most Liveable City

For those of you who might be reading this in search of a context (and who could blame you, as I have fallen way, way, way off the wagon from my original pledge to put up one blog post per day) my assignment with ESPN's Event Production department has brought me to Melbourne as part of the team covering the 2010 Australian Open tennis tournament. Now that we're here, everybody is taking a moment to relax and re-charge before the real work begins over the next 17 days. Good thing too, because if I were asked to sum up the experience so far in a single sentence, here goes: "Anybody who ever said 'getting there is half the fun' has obviously never flown to Australia."

That's where the rift in time I mentioned already comes in. I left my house in Bristol around 11:30 AM on Tuesday, cramped into the regional aircraft that services Hartford's Bradley Airport and spent two brief hours within striking distance of home during a stop at O'Hare in Chicago. By the time I touched down again a little after 7 PM Pacific time at LAX, the travel portion of this trip was actually ahead of schedule yet - wasn't even close to being halfway done. Then things got interesting.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles the entire ESPN crew was greeted with the news that the plane's departure for Sydney would be delayed due to the purposely vague and always encouraging reason of "aircraft servicing". Those of you familiar with George Carlin may immediately be defaulting in your head to the phrase "BROKEN PLANE!" With a couple of extra hours already in hand I met up with First Lt. Paul Jacobs of the USAF and visited one of about four things I actually miss now that I now longer live in Los Angeles. You can all have three guesses as to what it was but if you need to use more than one you clearly haven't been paying attention.

The flight finally boarded around 12:30 AM, more than two hours after the originally stated departure time. At which point we waited...and waited...and waited, again being told that there was just some minor "aircraft service" that needed to be completed before we could officially depart. Is it just me or do the airline personnel have an unsettling talent for making a situation sound as dire as humanly possible even as they speak in an upbeat tone?

So the 14-hour flight took off four hours late and there weren't a lot of ways to speed up crossing the entire Pacific Ocean. The saving grace was setting my watch to Melbourne time before I left L.A., so I was mentally just trying to stay alive until about 11:00 PM Wednesday (Melbourne time) while in flight - 4 AM Los Angeles time. Then it was lights out until we touched down in Australia - which to my mild surprise we did, so I guess I have to pay homage to all performers of the aircraft servicing. Mild fear was a small price exacted for being able to get there safe and sound without crashing onto a mystical, shape-and-time-shifting island. (That will hardly be the last Lost reference during these two weeks of journals, by the way). It didn't exactly come as surprise though when one of my co-passengers said the flight attendant told them that, in-flight, there had been real concern we would have to divert to Fiji due to a lack of fuel. Where was Flight 815 heading when it first changed course in the pilot episode?!? That's right - Fiji!

At this point we were finally landing in Sydney around the time we should've been at a baggage carousel in Melbourne, so what was another hour or so delay - for, you guessed it, additional "aircraft servicing". There's a wonderful new addition to the great Carlin rant about the jibberish airlines use to cover up what they really mean, but I've been traveling for too long and don't quite have the wit to make it. Feel free to take your own crack at it in the comments section.

To top it all off, when I finally arrived here I discovered that "universal power adapter" I bought several months ago had the plugs for all outlets except Australian ones. That wasn't a total loss though, because I got to go experience the "World Famous Arthur Daley's Clearance House" right across the street from the hotel. I have, however, completely exhausted the laptop battery writing this, so that's the cue to wrap things up.

Also, check out the VIDEO!!! portion of the blog at the other website. Why put these in two different places? Because if there's one thing ESPN has taught me it's that you've gotta branch yourself onto as many platforms as possible. And I want to see a lot of hits on two different websites, that's why.