To America and Beyond

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I arrived at the airport about 4 hours before the flight, I had a long time to wait, the queue was rather long to get to check bags though, so time went quickly. I had no troubles getting through customs and I got to wait around til the flight left at 7:30 pm.

I met an American girl at the lounge and we discussed differences between Australia and the US. She had just spent a month in Australia so she had quite a few things to tell me. Mainly the accent but differences in names of soft drink (in the US being soda or pop) and others.

I was sat right down the back of the plane, the third last row in the aisle with another American girl sitting in the window seat. The plane was a Boeing 777 so it had three groups of three seats across the plane. Each seat had its own TV with remote. It had on demand movies, television shows, games, information about cities and a cool thing which showed the planes ground speed, altitude, temperature outside, route, where we were currently located and the current time where we were located.

As soon as the seatbelt sign was off, the girl in the window seat got up and she went to one of the EIGHT empty rows in the middle of the plane, we had a lot of room to spread out. That then gave me three seats to myself and the chance to have a sleep later.

Dinner was served, a choice of lamb shoulder or Baka (I think - it was some kind of fish). Lamb shoulder suited me just fine. I then settled in to watch a couple of movies before trying to get some sleep. I ended out watching four for the whole flight. They were: 21, Black Sheep, The Truman Show and one other which I cant remember for the life of me! I didn’t watch all of those before I tried to get some sleep, just a couple. I watched a couple of episodes of the flight of the concords as well.

Our average altitude was about 12000 metres with an outside temperature of about -50 degrees Celsius. The flight time was about 11 hours 50 minutes with a cruising speed of 900 km/h.

I found the flight quite enjoyable with only a little turbulence at the start, it was caused by a good tail wind we had which cut our flight time down a bit but there were a few rather big bumps. It was very noisy in the plane from the engine roar but I bought some earplugs and an eye mask at the airport which helped, I don’t know if I got any sleep or not though!

Breakfast was scrambled eggs with sausages and other things which we had at about 11am US time, we landed on schedule in San Francisco at about 1pm.

When I arrived immigration was easy, it just took a while waiting in the lines to get through, customs was even easier! Because I had a connecting flight they didn’t even want to scan my bag, I walked through some doors on the far side of the customs room and could of just walked out of the airport into the carpark.

I allowed 5 hours to do all these and it took nowhere near that amount of time. There was an earlier flight to Seattle at 3:30pm which I tried to get on, they put me on the standby list but everyone turned up so I had to wait another couple of hours for my 5:30pm flight. The guy at the desk where I was waiting for the 3:30 flight gave me a window seat in the exit aisle which had HEAPS of leg room.

I met a lady in the airport who had come back to the US from Italy who was working for Boeing, it turned out her whole family works for Boeing and she had to do with the construction of the new 787 Dreamliner. The flight to Seattle was very quick, about one and a half hours total. The view outside was amazing. I saw Mount St. Helens, the volcano which erupted about 28 years ago. That was also the first time I had seen snow with my very own eyes!

The flight was a little delayed leaving so I arrived at about 7:30pm and went and found my transfer to the Green Tortoise Hostel.

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Comments

[Guang]

sounds like a pretty normal plane trip. btw 787 dreamliner > airbus A380. obviously not in size but you know what i mean.