Sydney-Bound

And that brings us to the present day – Sydney-bound

The one advantage to my mother not being able to join us was that I now had the ability to change our flights to consecutive flights instead of the sleepover in Los Angeles.  My mother had felt like the two flights in a row were too much for her, so we were going to meet up in LA – she coming from Chicago and us from New York – and stay overnight in a hotel.  The problem was the flights to Sydney don’t leave until 10 or 11 at night, so I had to figure out what to do with the kids for the whole next day, and then keep them up until 1:30am New York time for take off.  Not to mention dealing with all of the luggage in between flights, an ordeal even a trained octopus would have had trouble managing.  Now I could take off in New York, go to the next gate with our carry-on luggage in LA, wait a few hours, and board the plane to Sydney.  It seemed consolingly simple.

As much as I had planned and strategized and composed To-Do lists, the days before our departure were frenzied and completely nerve-wracking.  I tossed and turned at night thinking about what I had to do and what I was forgetting.  My daughter’s graduation came and went and it felt like I was checking a box of so many boxes.  (Fortunately I did take a video so I will be able to go back and actually enjoy it one day!)  I tried to remind myself I wasn’t going to rural China – even if I did forget something, they had many items for sale in Australia!  But it did little to comfort me.  The day we left, I was a tornado of energy finalizing preparations.  It was beyond my comprehension that with all of my planning, it had still come down to this, this 11th hour panic – I think ultimately no amount of preparation could have made me feel ready.  And then there I was, sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed, adrenaline-addled, slamming the door to our town car and telling the driver, “JFK, American Airlines, International Terminal please.”  We were really off, my two pups and I, no looking back.  Buh-bye New York City, see you in the fall!!

An inauspicious start

This was the time I had looked forward to for months.  All the preparations were done that were going to get done.  Everything was packed that was going to get packed.  And any errors on my part related to the aforementioned were just going to have to get worked out.  I’d left envelopes and boxes addressed to me for the folks staying in our apartment in case anything came up that we really needed.  I had a passport and credit cards.  I mean really, people have fled turbulent homelands being chased by a machete with less than what I had in my carry-on.  I would be fine, I would be able to make do.  I hugged my children, breathed a giant sigh of relief, and then our car ground to a halt in afternoon bumper-to-bumper traffic.

In my plan, I had left time for traffic jams, because in New York, you never know, but then that padding had gotten used up by my running from room to room three thousand times and stuffing more and more into our suitcases.  In fact I had so many last-minute items I decided I couldn’t live without that I had to grab an extra tote bag to bring along because I couldn’t fit another atom into my bulging suitcases.  (And that means no, I could not bring my pillow!)  So it was a nail biter as I watched the clock tick down.  The American Airlines representative who had helped me change my ticket had said that normally you should get to the airport two hours in advance for the Sydney trip, but with two young kids she recommended three.  I agonizingly saw the two-hour window slip through the hour glass.  Just as I thought we wouldn’t even get there with an hour to spare, the traffic surged forward and we were released from its grasp.  We raced on to JFK.  Luckily we had a full hour and a half, they did curbside check-in, and the nice lady at security let me and my two kids and all our carry-ons through in the short, First-Class line.

You would not have been happy if you had been the First-Class ticket holder who was next in line behind us.  We are quite a production getting through.  I have to say, I have done it so many times now, including sans husband, that I draw admiration from strangers and TSA alike as we dismantle strollers and car seats, get our twenty bags in twenty bins, get all the shoes and coats off etc etc, herd the kids as they try to run through the metal detector before they’re summoned, and then reassemble on the other side.  We’re fast, but we’re still way slower than the average passenger with a mere carry-on slung over their shoulder. 

In any case, we got through everything much quicker than I expected.  We have so much time to spare, I’m thinking, we’ll go and pick up snacks and extra reading materials at the airport shops for quadruple their value.  And then I mosey over to our gate, starting to feel relaxed and confident for the first time.  Surprisingly they’re already starting to board and there’s a crowd around our gate.  They’re calling out which rows are boarding.  I look at my tickets to see which row we are and I can’t find our seats listed on our tickets.  I approach the counter.  “Excuse me,” I say to one of the counter ladies.  “Excuse me, but I can’t find our seats on our tickets.”  She’s busy and distracted, but there’s no one else in line, so she says, “Let me see your tickets.”  I hand them to her.  “Uh-huh,” she says cryptically.  “It’s you and the two kids?”  “Yes,” I say.  “Okay,” she said, “Give me a minute.”  They continue to board groups of people.  I wait patiently as the crowd at the gate begins to thin.  There’s a man next to me who’s been antsy and now starts to complain to the counter lady.  “Look,” she finally says to him, “You’re stand-by.  It doesn’t look like you’re going to get a seat.  The American Airlines staff from the cancelled flight all came over to this flight.  This passenger here is ticketed and she doesn’t even have a seat.”  Uh, wha, excuse me????  “Excuse me, m’am, what do you mean we don’t have seats?  We bought these tickets more than a month ago!”  “We’re working on it ma’am.  Please be patient.” 

I was told to please be patient and they were working on it approximately 872 more times, as the crowd disappeared down the jetway.  Pretty soon it was just me and my kids and a bunch of antsy stand-by people, and a sense of panic was rising through my body.  I wasn’t completely freaking out because a similar situation had arisen not too long ago where a flight was cancelled and a counter person kept calmly telling me to be patient, they were working on it, and they actually came through.  However, I had overlearned from this experience.  I should have been freaking out.  By the time I did, by the time I was screaming that I had confirmed tickets on the flight and they couldn’t bump me, I was traveling alone with two kids, are you kidding me, by the time I had started protesting loudly, it was too late.  I was standing at the gate, my stroller, two kids and five carry-ons, and my lower lip was beginning to tremble.  “But, but, I’m traveling alone with two kids to Sydney!  Please, please, you can’t do this to me!!”  I was losing it.  I already had twenty hours of travel ahead of me just in air time alone.  I had visions of a missed connection in LA, having to retrieve all of our luggage and find a hotel all on my own with the kids, fill the kids’ day and then deal with getting back to the airport.  Alternatively, if I couldn’t get out on this day, as there was a rumor this was the last flight to LA, my guests were moving in the next day at my New York apartment so I almost couldn’t go home again.  It was a disaster, and I was losing it.  I felt the tears coming, and I decided to let them.  Under the theory that there is nothing more sympathetic than a mom bumped from her flight to Australia traveling alone with two toddlers than a weeping mom bumped from her flight to Australia traveling alone with two toddlers.  I’m sure it was all of the stress and lack of sleep leading up to this moment, because I swear to you I am not a crier, but I was literally openly sobbing. 

There was mutiny among the standers-by, who so considerately came to my defense.  “I can’t believe what you’re doing to this woman, it’s really not nice,” one man came up and reprimanded.  “Unbelievable!” said another, “You people should be ashamed!”  Another man came over and offered his help to me, saying if it had been his wife he’d hope that someone would come and do the same for her.  It was heart-warming to see the kindness in others emerge.  But then an unexpected consequence happened, which is that both of my kids started bawling, too, and shrieking, “The plane is leeeeaving!  Oh noooo!  We’re missing our plaaaaane!  We wanna see Daddy in Austraaaalia!!!  Waaaaaaaaaa!!!!!”  It may have ratcheted up the sympathy vote, but I felt horrible.  At that point I tried to rein it in for their sake.

What I would come to find out, after I saw the door shut and locked and my plane pull away, after I waited nearly an hour while the gate agent worked out an alternate route for me, was that there had been another flight to LA that had been cancelled just before ours was to leave.  The first part of the problem was that they put all of the staff and crew from that flight onto my flight. The second part is that all the passengers from that flight called the airline and booked seats on my flight.  And the reason they could do that, buy my seats at the spur of the moment that I had purchased more than a month before, was because… I didn’t have seats.  I’ve been flying a long, long time but somehow this nugget of information had escaped me.  If you have your seat assigned, apparently you can’t get bumped.  My original tickets had been booked by a travel agent and we had assigned seats.  When I changed the tickets to the consecutive flights, which I did myself, I didn’t think about the seats; since it was so close to our departure date I figured they wouldn’t be together so didn’t even try, but it never occurred to me that we didn’t have seat assignments at all.  So that is my Public Service Announcement of the day in case there is anyone else out there like me who didn’t happen to know this information:  get your seats assigned!!

The good news is the agent was able to book us tickets on Qantas all the way through.  It would be two totally different flights than I had reserved, and the JFK flight left three hours after my originally scheduled first flight, but our Sydney arrival time would only be about an hour later.  Also we would be at the same airline for our connection at LAX, which would be more convenient.  Then they gave us $300 fly vouchers per person, food vouchers at the terminal, and assigned a porter to help me get from the American terminal to the Qantas terminal.  I dried my tears, things were looking up.

Shout-out to Qantas

After we took a train to the next terminal, I realized with dismay as we entered the Qantas terminal from outside that I would have to suffer security all over again.  I saw long lines of travelers winding this way and that from both the check-in counters and security.  I was starting to melt down again, because they had told me at American that they hadn’t been able to actually book our seats on the Qantas flight, so it seemed possible they were just sending me to another terminal on a wild goose chase so they didn’t have to listen to me wailing.  But then the porter escorted me right up to the Qantas counter, where I was the first in line.  There were three young ticket agents there who guffawed with incredulity when I told them my story.  “Are you F-in kiddin me?!” they said.  “They bumped the mom traveling with two little kids!  Unbelievable!!”  I thanked them for their sympathy, I truly appreciated it after all I’d been through.  “Well we’re all moms!” one explained.  They continued to shake their heads in disbelief as they checked me in, booked us seats together, and then had one of their people walk me to the front of a security line so we wouldn’t have to wait.  I was pretty sure I was going to love Qantas.  

I really was a spectacle pushing through the airports, loaded up like a pack mule:  I had the kids in a double stroller, two backpacks hanging off the handles, was pulling behind a small carry-on suitcase on wheels, had a large Longchamp bag slung over a shoulder, and the striped tote bag hanging off a handle or over my other shoulder.  It was fairly symbolic of all my fears and anxieties – I’d brought enough electronic equipment to entertain a teenage boy’s slumber party, I had enough snacks and meals to also feed the slumber party guests, a change of clothes for everyone, a small library of books, First Aid, and so on – I was trying to bring along something for every scenario that could go amiss, of which there was an infinite combination of possibilities.  (In retrospect, I would have done just fine with two backpacks and ONE carry on for myself!)

The Qantas people saw me coming and approached me in the waiting area to ask if I needed help.  They insisted on carrying some of my bags for me and met me on the plane with them.  They gave Julia and Graham activity packs as we entered, a boy’s one and a girl’s one, and they squealed with delight.  It got even better – we had personal TVs on the seat-backs in front of us, and they had on-demand shows with kids’ shows – glory hallelujah!  They also had menu cards with the food they were going to serve.  All I had to see was that one of the choices was braised beef something or other, and I knew it was going to be way better than American’s “crappy cold cuts and other unappetizing selections for purchase” that they offered.  And then there was the handsome Aussie customer service specialist or whatever they call them on Qantas who welcomed us and would come by once in a while to tell us about Australia.  Not a bad welcome to the land down under. 

We got into LA around midnight New York time.  We’d all fallen asleep for awhile, but everyone rallied once we landed and had to pack up.  Surprisingly we still had to change terminals, but our customer satisfaction person had pre-arranged for someone to meet us as we got off the plane and help us make our connection.  (And they don’t even have to do all this crap, because they never crash!!)  They drove us on one of those little airport golf carts to the waiting room where we would pick up our bus to the next terminal.  Once off the bus, a woman came up to us with a hand cart to load our stuff up on, and then we went to our final waiting area of the trip.  Astonishingly, Julia and Graham quietly played video games while we waited for our next flight, at 1:30 in the morning New York time!  There was even a 45-minute delay to board, and they continued to do fine.  All the wild meltdowns and psychotic behavior I had imagined?  POOF!  I had seen them behave worse after a long day at the park, so I was completely blown away and incredibly grateful.

The long flight was amazingly as manageable as the first flight.  You’re flying into the sunset so the majority of the trip is in darkness, and most people spend much of it sleeping.  They manage your time expertly.  They wake you up after the first hour to feed you a meal.  It seems odd, eating at 4 in the morning on your normal body clock, but they’re starting to get you on your new time clock.  They won’t feed you breakfast for 10 hours, so they try to get everyone awake and eating.  (Though they do come by with a tasty snack in between.) 

The hardest part was sleeping, as it was hard for all of us to get comfortable.  In the beginning the kids were sitting up with their heads bent at alarming angles.  I eventually figured out that we could pull the arm rests up so they could stretch out horizontally.  I had them side by side, one head on my lap and one going the other way.  Once we had settled into our new positions, they fell sound asleep.  I was content as only a mother could be, watching her children comfortable and nourished by a deep and peaceful sleep.  So blissful was it to behold, that I let the exhaustion overtake me and soon fell fast asleep myself, drooling away on the complimentary Qantas pillow.