As i know that i must first apologize for not starting this sooner, but my little sisters new life in Korea and blog has inspired me to also do so. Carrie and I both had our own reasons to travel and are both discovering more as we make our paths. I hope that this forum can help us both understand the journey that we have already begun and see how we have grown.
Our journey started in St. Louis, with us receiving our itinerary but then receiving a different set of flight tickets. It didn't take long for us to realize that we were going to have a few more unexpected layovers, in Denver and Sydney, along with the previously known Los Angeles and our final destination of Melbourne. Our meeting at Lambert was good but awkward at the same time. My parents dropped me off early leaving me to entertain myself with my ipod and a sparsely populated airport to people watch. Our goodbyes were short and sweet, and i could see that my parents were almost equally excited to see me off to another country as i was to go. They both had been unbelievably helpful and supportive in helping me wrap up all the "loose ends" that needed binding before one leaves their normal life for a year. For that I can never thank them enough. But with my bags in hand it still didn't seem like a reality but meeting Carrie, her mom, Tyler and tom seemed to bring the realization that this was no weekend trip. Trying to seem responsible it only took, 1.2 seconds for my true nature to show when trying to find my passport in my overstuffed bags, and literally having to blow the dust off my luggage to try to stay within the designated weight limits. With our hellos, nice to meet yous, hugs, handshakes, and goodbyes we were off to LA.
Getting to LA seemed like an easy first step. An easy journey to help us feel accomplished in someway even though we hadn't really accomplished anything but leaving St. Louis. We knew we had some time to kill so we found a comparatively speaking cheap wrap, we sat and had good conversation for a while. After eating we finally convinced each other that it would be a good idea to get some Internet access to send Simon a picture of us so he actually knew what we looked like, even though we still had no idea of who to look for or what to look for. At this point in our trip paying for Internet seemed so ridiculous and frivolous, but little did we know that this would be the precursor for Internet all through our trip.
It wasn't long after we purchased internet time that we were off in our computer worlds seated a few meters from our gate charging and listening to our ipods, etc...when carrie heard our names being announced over the intercom throughout the airport. unfortunately, it took us about two more times to verify that it was our names being called for final boarding, and another two for us to get our things together and haul our stuff to the gates. so needless to say we were the last ones to board, but did make our flight to australia!
