Well I figure I got some sleep last night anyway, before the lights went on and they started wheeling around the breakfast trolleys, so that's a good start. I just filled in the immigration form thingie (why don't they ever hand out pens with those things?), and the transition across the dateline is going grand - all I had to do was leave out Sunday (which seems exceedingly obvious in retrospect). We're just over a couple of hours out of Sydney, and I've got directions on how to get the train from the airport, transfer at Central Station and phone Dizzy & Britta to collect me when I get to Chatswood. Britta mentioned that Dizzy would be at a gaming convention this weekend, so maybe it's still going on. I've been on the go for a long time, haven't slept very well for very long and will be confused and disoriented. Now if only I could produce a hangover from somewhere, I'd be in perfect gaming convention condition.
Amongst the things I dreamed about during my attempts at sleeping last night (as it were) were a very angry gorilla chained up in the foyer of a large mansion (where do you hide from such a beast? He can climb better than you and can batter down internal doors no problem), and the Sillicon 6 pub quiz (it seems that it'll have a lot of Lego trainsets involved).
Monday, 21st April 2003, 7:45 a.m. EST, Chatswood train station
So I've arrived and I'm just waiting for Dizzy to show up to collect me. It could not have gone smoother, even my bag, which is large and heavy and irregularly-shaped and has dangly bits hanging off it and was put on in San Francisco and had to transfer flights independantly of me beat the odds and made it. At Sydney Airport they had little sniffer-dogs and they asked people to put their hand luggage on the ground so the dogs could smell it, which was cool after the high-tech auto-swab-sniffer thing they wiped my computer down with in the States. The train to here went over the Harbour Bridge or whatever it's called and I could see the famous-if-somewhat-silly-looking Opera House, which is a good way of driving home the fact that you've arrived.