Heading Home

The long day’s journey into day. The weird paradox of leaving Australia and arriving back in the US earlier then you left. The 13 hour flight where you get no sleep because it’s daytime and then you land at 6:30 in the morning and you’re totally exhausted because your body thinks it’s after midnight and you should be in bed sound asleep. Call it what you will, it sucks.

We finished checking in for our flight from Sydney just after 7:30. We then proceeded to waste nearly 30 minutes finding the lounge due to the really poor directions from the trainee who checked us in. We could tell she was a trainee because it took her three tries to correctly print our boarding passes.

I watched 4 movies on the flight, which I’m pretty sure is a personal record for me. We also had our first ever male flight attendant on Virgin. He was fabulous. But not sleeping just sucks. We had about two hours to kill in the Delta lounge before boarding our flight to Phoenix. We had two celebrity sightings there – Chris D’elia and Greg Grunberg. Okay, not super big names, but still pretty exciting. Greg Grunberg actually ended up sitting near us for a few minutes and I talked to him. Just normal traveler conversation.

When we landed in Phoenix, I ran for the bathroom while my husband waited for the luggage. When I returned, he had one bag and was waiting for the second, along with another man from our flight who had received two of his three bags. We stood there long enough for me to get nervous, then I got paged to the baggage office. Turns out, one bag had been loaded on an earlier flight. Something I would have known if I had turned on my phone after landing – Delta had sent an automatic email right after our flight took off. Home safe.