MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1983 - Mississippi Years

Travel (continued)

Australia

Nancy and I flew out of the Golden Triangle airport to Dallas, then on to Los Angeles. From there it was a 14-hours flight to Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, Australia. When we got to our hotel at 10:30 pm in Sydney, it was exactly 24 hours from the time we went to bed in Starkville, Mississippi, but two days later. Since we had crossed the International Date Line going west, we lost a day.

We went for a morning jog, going under the Sydney Harbor Bridge, down to the quay and around the internationally famous Sydney Opera House. We had no specific plans for our Australian tour only a rough idea of the places we wished to visit, so we spent half a day at a local travel agency in Sydney filling in the details and making the necessary reservations. The gist of it was that we would take three one-day guided tourist bus tours out of major destinations: Sydney, Cairns, Melbourne, Adelaide, Alice Springs, Canberra (the capital city), plus a few days in each of these destinations as well. We were gone 30 days and saw as much as one can of the southeastern one-third of a country that is three-quarters the size of the United States. In other words, we scratched the surface. Memorable places (aside from the cities) were: Daintree Rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock), Great Ocean Road, Kangaroo Island, Blue Mountians, plus a few various wineries along the way.

We left Sydney, traveled 24 hours, and arrive home at the same time on the same day. It took us two days to get there and zero days to get home.