This guidebook, wrapped in the story of two Americans who flew away to Queensland in 2005.
Chapter 1
WE’RE OFF
The 8,333-mile leap
Los Angeles airport was a madhouse. From a carousel in the domestic terminal, we retrieved our four brand-new, fully stuffed bags and began looking for signs to the international terminal. We thought we should have enough time to find and get on board our Qantas flight, but we were not sure, and we were hoping to find, somewhere in that Friday night LAX mob scene, Kristi’s best friend, Scottie. She was living in Los Angeles and she’d driven to the airport to see us off. Normally, finding each other would not have been much of a problem since she always carried a cell phone and we did, too. Told ours wouldn’t work in Australia, though, we’d left it behind.
With one very large and one medium-sized suitcase rolling along behind each of us and with our carry-on bags strapped to our backs, Kristi and I walked to the international terminal. The taxis and buses in the streets were just creeping along anyway and we were in a hurry.
Packing: how big? how heavy?
Kristi: Maybe this is a good time to tell you about bag size and weight limits. Qantas allows (as we write this, anyway) two checked bags per passenger with a maximum weight per bag of 70 pounds. Flying in economy class, we were allowed one checked bag with total dimensions (height plus width plus thickness) of up to 62 inches (158cm) but the two together could not have dimensions adding up to more than 106 inches (270cm).
If you begin your flight with a US airline, though, the rules of that company will determine the size and weight of your checked luggage. American Airlines passengers, for example, can have two checked bags with total dimensions of 62 inches each, but each one can weigh only 50 pounds, 20 less than the Qantas limit.
Before you start packing, though, check with the first airline you’ll be boarding. The carry-on and checked-baggage regulations change from time to time and vary depending on what country you’re flying to. If you show up with one over-weight bag and one under-weight bag, and if the desk clerk isn’t too busy, you can transfer your carefully packed stuff from one to the other.
Returning to the US from Australia, if you check your bags with Qantas all the way through to your destination, we found, the heavier weight is accepted by connecting flights on American or Delta or Continental, even though you’ll have to retrieve your bags at your first US stop, take them through customs, and re-check them. Again, the rules of the country of origin or the original airline seem to rule.
We’d packed to the limit in weight, but we were pretty sure we were not over because I’d weighed each bag on the bathroom scale. I did that by weighing myself and then weighing myself holding each bag. Kristi had to read the scale. We did the math and shifted items until we were about a pound under limit in the heaviest bags. At the DFW ticket counter, we crossed our fingers and then breathed a sigh of relief when our suitcases passed their weight test. There was nothing in any one of the four bags that we wanted to be without.
Kristi: We were also afraid that our largest bags might be rejected because, if you put a tape measure on them, they are a fraction of an inch wider than regulation limits. That made me nervous, but the check-in counter folk we have encountered so far seem happy with eyeball measurements and the little bit of extra width didn’t hang us up. May that always be the case.
We used every square inch and nearly every ounce of what the airline allowed us, knowing that we’d be living out of those suitcases for a little while or a long time. The things we had movers transfer for us could take months to reach us, we were told. (They did: two and a half months.) So, we had struggled with two hard questions.
1. What goods should we spend lots of money having shipped? We got rid of our television and other electronic entertainment gear, but I wanted to bring about 50 music CDs and to store a couple of hundred more. A few special cooking tools, including our bread machine, went into our “ship this” collection. We also decided to ship our nice, firm mattress, which we’d just bought although a Qantas employee I talked to on the phone while we were making these decisions told me with frost in her tone, “We have bedding in Australia.” Since we’d be arriving in winter, we shipped out lightweight summer clothes. But since we’d learned that Brisbane winters are mild we took the chance of shipping, not packing, a couple of heavy coats we thought we might need sometime. (We did, but not until our second full winter.) Into our bags, we put only a couple of light jackets.
2. What should we be sure to fit into our luggage? For an undetermined number of months we’d have to live with what we’d packed or we’d have to buy replacements in Australia at prices about which we had no clue. Would our favorite products be available down under? (Answer: Some, yes; some, no. More on this later.) We played a guessing game with less than complete information and I’m not sure we made the best decisions in all cases.
If we had these decisions to make again, we would ship less and buy more replacement goods here. Strangely enough, I’m still happy that I brought an eight-pound lump of metal in my suitcase, a transformer I’d bought on eBay so I could use our US-built appliances with Australian electrical current. A smaller one would have worked, but this was what I had, and it let me use my electric toothbrush right off, and, as soon as they arrived, our bread machine, espresso coffee maker, and scanner, too. I haven’t seen these transformers for sale in Australian stores.
I’d still want our music CDs with us here and we needed most all of the clothes we packed or shipped. Clothing, by the way, seems awfully expensive here. Still, I now think that traveling light is generally a good policy even when you’re moving. Ship some things that’ll help you feel more at home, yes, but don’t be too generous with your choices. Australians do make good bedding.
By the way, please note that the name of Australia’s main airline contains no “u.” It’s an acronym for “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services,” and it drives some Aussies nuts to see it written as “Quantas,” as I invariably spelled it at first.
Meanwhile, back at LAX…
Kristi: When we finally got to the international terminal, we kept our eyes out for Scottie, but the crowds were so large we had little hope of spotting her and we needed to be in line at the Qantas check-in as soon as possible. It was a good thing we went straight there because we hit a snag with Bob’s visa.
Since my passport was due to expire in a few months, I had acquired a new one while we were still in Oklahoma. Although I didn’t notice the difference at the time, my new passport arrived with my middle initial omitted, listing me just as Robert Hill. The paperwork Australia had sent us listed me the way my old passport had, as Robert L. Hill.
That, the Qantas worker at the ticket counter said, would not do. As she frowned at the passport and the visa, my mind raced ahead to visions of saying goodbye to Kristi at the gate, finding a hotel room, waiting until the appropriate offices opened on Monday, and then catching a later flight across the ocean. Before I could get to even worse fantasies about being barred from Australia forever because of one missing initial, the woman behind the counter smiled ever so slightly and said there might be a solution. After conferring with someone by phone, she produced a form for us to fill out and, with that and an extra $50 payment, we were able to check in. We were free to go. To the next long line.
By the time we’d made our way through the security checkpoint and found the gate for our Qantas flight, we were approaching boarding time. All Kristi could do was find a pay phone and call Scottie’s cell phone. They talked for a while and I’m sure they shed a few tears of disappointment. We’d been looking forward to seeing Scottie and it would have been cool to have her send us on our way. As it was, she had a nighttime trip to LAX for nothing.
On board
But we made it, and at 11:20 p.m., Friday, June 24, I wrote in my notebook, “We’re on our Qantas flight and our mood is improving. We just had a conversation with a stewardess who was standing behind our seat and I agree with Kristi that it is fun to hear her talk. We think we’re going to like Australian accents.”
We lucked out with seating on this flight. Since we were in the back row of a section, there were no knees pressing into the back of our seats, and because we had a three-seat section to ourselves, Kristi could sleep with her head in my lap for much of the long night’s flight. It’s easy for me to sleep sitting up, so I did some of that, but I also read, watched television, and enjoyed knowing that our long-anticipated move was actually happening.
So much uncertainty and preparation had gone into the months, week, and days before this flight that it was a relief to know that, important or not, anything we’d omitted from our lists couldn’t be attended to now. Here is just one such list, which we’d put together three months earlier:
Finish negotiating possible house sale.
Weigh merits of renting our house instead. Furnished, unfurnished?
Arrange for movers.
Choose and contract for a storage unit.
Clean out garage and office.
Mow the lawn.
Plan garage sales.
Advertise garage sales in paper.
Sort things to sell, give away, discard.
Follow up on visas.
Get appointments with authorized doctors.
Bob: get new passport.
Sell both cars.
Check on reserving a Prius in Australia.
Get motel reservation for first week in Brisbane.
Announce our decision to move to those who don’t know.
Find out about airline luggage limits, size, weight.
Buy luggage.
Both Kristi and I had even longer to-do lists related to our jobs, but now, as we sat in the plane on the LAX runway, every item was either checked off or abandoned forever.
And we had said our goodbyes during the previous weeks to families, friends, and colleagues. While Kristi had spent a couple of days in Houston with her parents, two of my brothers, Mike and Ronald, had visited me in Oklahoma. We’d sat on the back porch of our house in Norman, drinking beer and talking, looking out over the lawn and trees that Kristi and I had spent way too many hours tending. My other brother, Gary, came to Fort Worth to hang out with me as I finished up my work for the Unitarian Universalist Association, the day before our departure. And I’d spent extra time with my daughter, Lyn, her husband, Scott, and my grandsons, Cooper and Casey.
In several situations, I’d found myself to be unexpectedly tearful. My emotions were much closer to the surface than normal in the blur of busy-ness just before we left. And then, almost before I knew it, Kristi and I were in the midst of (according to a web site’s estimate of the distance from Dallas to Brisbane) an 8,333-mile leap from the country we’d always called home.
Kristi: It certainly was a long flight from LAX. My advice about long flights is: sleep as much as you can. The Qantas plane we were on had TV screens in the seat backs in front of us that gave us access to several channels of programming. Sleeping as much as we could, though, was the best help.
Our direct flight to Brisbane took a bit more than 14 hours, a long time to be sitting in a metal tube with a few hundred other people. If you get a flight that requires a stop in Melbourne or Sydney, the trip can be much longer, of course. Fortunately for us, Qantas offers this late-night direct flight from LAX to Brisbane, currently, six times a week.
Arrival
We landed in Brisbane just after sunrise on Sunday, June 26. Back in Dallas, in the time zone to which our bodies were attuned, people were enjoying the Saturday afternoon we’d skipped. Not one of our bags had been lost by Qantas, though, and getting through customs was simple, uncomplicated, and fairly quick.
Kristi’s new boss, Wendy, graciously picked us up, drove us through Brisbane, and dropped us off at our motel in St. Lucia, leaving us to sleep or recuperate in whatever way we preferred. Our second floor unit had a bedroom, small kitchen, and living/dining room, but when we opened up our bags so we could get to our clothes and other things, there wasn’t much space left for moving around our rooms. We didn’t care. We were safely housed and full of energy. It was time to go out and begin exploring.
CityCat tour
Who told us to take the CityCat, the river ferry with catamaran boats? Perhaps it was Wendy. Whoever made the suggestion did us a great favor because this was the best imaginable way for us to spend our first hours in Brisbane. We got directions to the nearest CityCat stops, bought all-day tickets for a little over $5 each, and rode up the Brisbane River to the University of Queensland campus. We found Kristi’s building easily and I took pictures of her standing by its sign: Human Movement Studies. I figured her family would like to see where she’d be working in five days. The building was all locked up for the weekend, so we caught another CityCat and headed back in the other direction on the beautiful river.
You can sit well sheltered inside the CityCat’s cabin, but we managed to work our way to the front railing so we could face into the wind and have a good view of everything on this cool and partly cloudy day. From the UQ stop we went to the West End stop, then darted across the river to Guyatt Park. A longer ride took us back to the Regatta stop in Toowong, which is where we had got on. From here the ferry speeds along what is called “the long reach” to North Quay (pronounced “key”) in the Central Business District (CBD). Then we went over to South Bank Parklands, on to the Queensland University of Technology stop, then to Riverside, Sydney Street, Mowbray Park, New Farm Park, Hawthorne, Bulimba, and, finally, Brett’s Wharf. Then we rode back to the Regatta stop.
By the time we got off, we’d had a conversation with some tourists, including a farmer’s wife who told us not to look for mangos until December because the season starts around Christmas most years. We had also gazed at the tall buildings of the CBD and at the bridges, parks, warehouses, businesses, apartment complexes and homes that line the river as it twists and turns like the huge snake that, according to Aboriginal legend, lives on its bottom. It was a little more than two hours well spent, and after two years we still delight in riding the CityCat whenever it is convenient to do so. For most trips, Brisbane’s excellent train and bus system makes more sense, and a ticket on one – CityCat, train, or bus – entitles you to ride the others without extra charge.
For pure enjoyment, though, nothing beats the CityCat as a means of getting around. If everything in our new life could be counted on to proceed as easily as our first day, we decided, then we could begin to use, with great sincerity, a phrase we kept hearing from Australians: “No worries.”
Read more about Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under and Robert Hill HERE.
Copyright 2008 Robert Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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