The mid
afternoon temperature hovered around +1 C.
Our plane was scheduled to leave Vancouver, Canada, shortly before
midnight on Friday, February 3rd, (or shortly before 7 P.M. Saturday evening in
Sydney) for the 15 hour 12,856 km. flight to Sydney, Australia. However, Vancouver was experiencing a snow
storm which dumped more than 10 cm of snow on the lower mainland and caused
some flights to be cancelled as well as problems for people to get to the
airport. We saw the graders clearing the
runways. Another item was that the planes had to be de-iced before take-off, to
remove accumulated snow from the plane’s exterior. The snow also caused problems for the ground
crew who loaded and unloaded the baggage, as well as requiring heavier tractors
with chains on the tires needed to move the big planes away from the terminal
to be de-iced. The flight was delayed 30
minutes when we arrived at the airport and was filled with passengers shortly
after midnight, but it left Vancouver almost 2 hours late, early on the morning
of February 4th.
We had
logged 17,972 steps, about 18.7 miles. The plane did not make up the time
flying to Sydney causing some passengers to miss connections, which were
rescheduled by Sydney staff and their new boarding passes were ready when they
landed.
The plane still had the TV screen on the back
of the seats, so you did not need to use your tablet to watch the movies or other
entertainment video and audio. We
remembered to take our noise cancelling ear buds that made for less noise. We were able to get 60 or 90 minutes of
dosing, in between several times of shaky turbulence around the Hawaiian Islands. There was a light hot dinner, when the plane
was finally in the air, at about an hour into the flight. At a little after 8 hours of flying time, a
snack of a chicken sandwich and cookies was served and it was hardly cleared when
another series of significant turbulence. During the flight, hundreds of
kilometers west of Hawaii, we crossed
the Equator in addition to crossing the International Dateline, which caused us
to advance our watches, and other electronic devises to the next day making the
Sydney time 19 hours ahead of Vancouver time. We had “lost” a day, but we will
gain it back when we return to Canada.
About 2
hours before the plane landed, about 8:15 a.m. Sydney time now Sunday (or 1:15 p.m.
Saturday. in Vancouver) an omelet breakfast was served. Once that was cleared, the Australian Border
Services immigration & customs cards needed to be completed, ready for on
the ground inspections. We landed about 12:15 p.m., instead of 10:35 a.m. as
scheduled. But before leaving the plane,
Australian aircraft disinfection procedures required that the plane’s cabin
with the passengers still seated, needed to be sprayed and we had to wait about
10 minutes before we could get off the plane.
We had taken the air pollution masks that we did not need in China last
year and used them as masks to filter out the insecticide. We cleared
Australian Border immigration & customs lines within 30 minutes and our
luggage was circling on the baggage carousel.
Next, we left the immigration hall to search for the train station, and
just followed the signs, to take the train into Sydney is less than 20
minutes. We needed to buy a $20 Australian
subway ticket which was good for all transit forms for the rest of the day. A taxi would have cost $50 Australian. The
Australian dollar is about at par with the Canadian dollar, although the
hotel’s exchange rate is CDN $1.16 to one Australian dollar, a good reason to
bring the local currency with you when visiting a foreign country.
We got off the train at Museum station and
after turning the wrong way once were checked into the Holiday Inn Darling
Harbour by 2:30 p.m. The building was
built in the late 19th century as a wool store. It is close to Chinatown, just
one street over containing stores and Chinese and other Asian restaurants. Also within 10 minutes of walking is Paddy’s
Market.
After
freshening up and changing to summer clothes we struck out to explore Sydney,
Australia.
The
afternoon exploring of Sydney near can be found the February 5, 2017 blog.
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