Thank you all for your patience while waiting for my posts to start up… I have struggled badly the past week with jetlag, acclimatising (I will never complain about Melbourne 40 degree days again!) and then I had to get the apartment all pretty. Back to normal now though. 🙂
If you are flying to the USA from Australia on Qantas anytime soon, check out the USA arrivals information video that they show just after takeoff and you’ll see a typos that unfortunately, was not on the screen long enough for me to photograph – basically it tells us to fill out the Visa WAVER form. 😉
Back in January, my MEL-LAX flight on Qantas was nothing short of appalling. The crew were non-existent, there was literally no service whatsoever, they grimaced constantly and there was a couple of shabby water services through the flight and that was it for ‘extra service’.
The difference on this flight over was a complete 360 of the January experience. The crew were prompt, courteous, friendly and more importantly, smiled! It made such a difference to the whole flying experience when you are stuck in one seat for 14 hours. Ugh.
A lot of you would know of my penchant for eating meals at 35,000 feet and the fare on this flight wasn’t bad and you can get the full in-flight meal experience here– I took photos of each service.
I chose the Heart Foundation meal for dinner, the hot breakfast for brekky and the inflight ‘Snack on Q’ snack bag had an awesome surprise – CARMAN’S ORGANIC CORN CHIPS!!!! Firstly, they make the best museli bars ever invented on the face of the planet and now they are making organic corn chips which were just fantastic and what is needed after ten hours in the air!!
The in-flight entertainment was, as usual, absolutely fabulous. For me, having short, tv programs is something I prefer over long movies – especially for the daytime component of the flight when I must stay awake. So I watched a Kylie concert, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares x 2 and Trinny and Susannah x 2. I then decided to start watching Gone With the Wind. What a great inflight movie choice by Qantas as this movie takes up about a third of the flight time! So I settled in to watch Mammy screaming at Scarlett and got 2.5 hours through when… BLACK SCREEN. I hit the screen, pushed the buttons on my controller furiously when it came to my attention that the whole rear of the plane suffered entertainment system blackout. NOOOOOOOO!! Not during the Gone with the Wind. I took that as a sign that I should sleep and did get some in bits and pieces.
I ended up also watching Iron Man which was something I really really enjoyed – one of the better films I have watched recently, Robert Downey Jnr was great.
It wasn’t before long that the descent into LA was to begin. That flight ended up ‘feeling’ like the quickest MEL-LAX I have ever flown. I am sure the crew played a part in this… as well as the lack of turbulence that I have experienced every single time I have flown this route. Coming into LA, we also flew in over very different areas of California instead of straight over the Pacific shores and into LAX. We ended up running late by the time we landed and taxied to the gate the ‘long way’. By the time we got off the plane it would have been close to 8.00am instead of 7.30am. I always push it for time to connect to the NY flight and today was no exception. My flight to New York was due to depart at 9.05am.
This gave me 1 hour and 5 minutes to –
*Get off the actual plane (I was at the very back)
*Walk the 5,000 kilometres to immigration
*Line up at immigration
*Line up some more at immigration
*Get taken aside for additional fingerprinting/Green Card paperwork
*Collect my bags
*Set them aside
*Wait for immigration confirmation
*Collect my bags again (remember – 5 x cases + 1 carryon)
*Go through Customs
*Dump my bags at the ‘connecting flights’ conveyor belts
*Run up to the American Airlines terminal
*Line up again
*Take my shoes off, take my laptop and portable hard drive out of my bag
*Go through security
*Put my shoes back on
*Run to the gate
*Board the flight
Did I make that flight?
Stay tuned!