Adventures in Oz

July 20, 2008
I am starting this update at 4:45 PM with six lost “sheep” still to come to the barn (dorm -P&O) exactly when we do not know. With bomb scares on the plane in L.A. and general confusion in Sydney because World Youth Week with the Pope ending Sunday, we have students straggling in over a much longer time than expected. It may be a late night before they all get here. I hope not too late because we are fixing them breakfast tomorrow morning at 8:00 and their orientations starts at 9:00. We had a pizza dinner in the P&O during the evening since some would not have had a chance to get to the store for food. (Note: They arrived at 11:00 PM but were not able to get their phone to call us so they came over in taxies. They were all tired but all arrived safely.)
Actually this email was to say what happened on our flight as I promised in my earlier short email to some of you but the students had much more arduous trek than we. Monica and Dave dropped us off at the Holiday Inn to catch the Executive Express to the airport and all was good. We thank them for doing the service. It was very nice. Our flight out on NWA was a tad unusual. We had a couple asking or sort of demanding that the stewardess find three seats together because they had a cranky two year old. I would have left the two year old in the seat by himself while having mom and dad sit together. (Well maybe not?!) Finally because this was delaying getting us off the ground two men volunteered to swap seats just to get us going but at this point it was two late, so said the stewardess, to make the switch so their were going to make do at least after the start of the flight but it didn’t happen. The little boy was good for a time but than he was not so happy. I was not certain that his lungs and throat would hold out. They did.
Our flight out of L.A. was uneventful except for an hour delay to replace a temperature probe. I don’t know where or what it was being probed but it seemed to be important to the pilot. The flight was long as usual but not unbearable. As we were within a couple of hours range of Brisbane (yes, this is a good distance when you consider the total flight takes 13 hours) in particular, the captain came on and said that we were a little short of fuel and that although we might have enough to make it, it would be outside the safety margin so we were to stop in Noumea capitol of New Caledonia. This is a French speaking island just to the northeast of Australia. It appeared lovely looking out the window but who knows we might go back. Captain said at the start of the process that it should take less than an hour to get the needed fuel. Of course it didn’t. As he told the stewardesses to prepare for take off, he said that the ground crew had never fueled a 747 before so they had to get out show them how. There was also something about hand pumping but that is foggy in my mind. So when we landed in Brisbane, we were several hours late and there were many people needing to make new connections. I must give Qantas a lot of credit because they put some of us who had longer delays up in a very nice hotel in downtown Brisbane with lunch and a snack, and taxi to and from the airport. When we finally arrived in Perth, Neil, the landlord of our flat, met us at the airport at about 1:30 AM to bring us to the new apartment and show us around for a moment. That was awfully nice of him to do this.
We will talk more about the orientation week in the next entry. We see some changes at the uni (Australian for university) and in Freo which we will describe. I will send this out via email and enter it on the blog. Some find it easier to read via email and others may not want to read it until they can bring it up on the blog. Here is the connection: http://bndickau.blogspot.com/index.html - B