OK....here's the beginning of this TravelPod to Australia and New Zealand.

Lisa Fenchel drove Bev and me to the Cincinnati airport where we left on time at 4 pm and arrived in Los Angeles right now schedule at 6 PM Pacific time . Almost a five hour flight and we greatly look forward to the next leap from Los Angeles to Melbourne.  

The flight is full. There are four flights each night from Los Angeles to Australia....two to Sydney and one each to Brisband and our destiantion Melbourne. The flights are jammed full as Australia is a popular destination. Getting there is easy with these four non-stops.

In the morning before leaving Cincinnati I discovered one unknown to me fact. You need a visa to travel to Australia....not a hard one to get, but a necessary one. I only discovered this because I was going to get boarding passes and almost decided not to because usually they don't let you print them at home for overseas flights....but I thought I'd try. Lo and behold I discover we need visas!  

Called our Australian expert Peter Eddington about this and he told me about the procedure which I thought would be easy .  

Not so.

After getting on the site, I entered my information several times only to be told that something was wrong with my name....since I had no middle name and had to put both names on the Family Name....not "Given" name which is your first name. Finally got that straight. But, each time I had to enter ALL the information about address, purpose of visit and credit card number. Finally that came through.

Next, Bev's application. She DOES have a middle name and both those names go on the Given Name line. Finally I got confirmation that both applications were approved. It took the better part of an hour in the busy morning getting ready to leave

Then we were checking into our Qantas flight in Los Angeles they had no record of our Visa application. The clerk called immigration and they found it but told us there were problems with it . My name was misspelled. Beverly's and my birthdays were wrong. I had a totally erroneous date for my date of birth. We were beginning to look very suspicious. Finally, after more questions we were issued boarding passes....but not without a bit of hassle. 

The flight over was more than 15 hours and we were more than half hour late. One person was asked to leave the plane and his luggage had to be found because of visa problems. That could have been us!  

We were assigned the wrong seats and were in an extraordinarily cramped part of the plane. We were able to reserve bulkhead seating, but they didn't give it to us. We lived. I was able to sleep about 5 hours on this flight which is more than usual. There were some good television documentaries from Australian TV to watch. A good TV serious about the Agony of Living. I want to see more of these episodes on YouTube when I get home.

We fly through the night....