city lights from my balcony
Dude! This is a long flight! Going to and fro Iraq a few years ago was longer, so I thought it wouldn’t really seem long to me… wrong. My lack of planning for this trip first surfaced boarding the long flight out of LA when my ticket beeped because I didn’t get a Visa from the Austalian government. The Quantas website didn’t tell me to when i bought a ticket… so there I stood; in front of all the other passengers as they boarded, next to the duty free monger with a shopping cart full of booze, while the ticket clerks called Aussie land to get me squared away. As I assessed all the odd looks I received by the procession of visa possesing passengers all I could think about was how I decided to save a few bucks and gain a bit of adventure by splitting an apartment with a girl I met in the parking lot for two seconds after the national race and two other folks that she had met at the same race, but I hadn’t. I had already sent the one that booked the place some money and all I had was an address in Surfer’s Paradise and the thought that I can sleep on the beach in my bike bag if worst comes to worst. “This trip could be bad,” popped into my mind.
Luckily the Quantas folks got a hold of the right people or decided it didn’t matter and two seconds before the door closed I hoped on, the last guy on the plane. I did my walk of shame back to row 70 to claim the only open seat remaining… dead in the middle of the middle aisle… and was greated by a cute girl cussing that her luck of an open seat next to her had run out. Hmmm… I laid on my best charm to try and smooth the situation out as this was going to be a long flight… and it must have worked because a few hours into the flight I had her rubbing my shoulders before I fell asleep. What luck! “This is going to be a good trip,” now replaced my thoughts.
I landed in Sydney a day and a half later only to find that my bike hadn’t made the trip and my $30 worth of homemade trail mix was going to be enjoyed by customs mates instead of my friends and I. It’s all good, the bike will make it and I won’t starve. At worst case I now had an offer to chill out at the local university for a week with magic fingers which is not as good as my original plan, but not that bad either. I marched on to Brisbane meeting more racers along the way as we all seemed pretty easy to pick out by our bike t-shirts, visors and carry on wheel bags and I came to the realization that friends are never more then a “Hi, how’s it going?” away when you travel around the world to race a triathlon with a few thousand other freeks. I told myself that again as I showed up to the empty meeting location my new roomates had talked about and confirmed that my cell phone really doesn’t work here.
No worries! As they say down under. A few racers offered to give me a lift, but before they split I tried my luck at an international pay phone hoping my roomate with the rental car had a better luck on her phone… and she did! What luck. “Three kilometers away,” she said and before I new it all four of us were in the sweet diesel SUV driving down the Gold Coast on the left side of the road.
My luck continued as my three roomates have turned out to be an eclectic mix of cool people including a 50+ year old man that won the first triathlon in San Diego in 1975, an age group national champ Jodie Foster look alike from Cali and a crazy cheese head that I think is really Sarah Conner who is running around practicing ripping her wet suit off with a stop watch cussing as I’m writing this. We’ve been having a blast training every day in the Aussie riviera, despite the bull sharks in the bay, eating the truck load of groceries we bought the first day, and drinking wine in the hot tub with Canadians. Today is the Aquathlon (run, swim, run) that we are doing as a tune up, and I made a giant brekky for all. Wish me luck. I gotta run and get rid of these free Quantas Airline socks that I’ve had on for three days… my roomies say they stink.
Pedal Fast
JP
