Travel day: Australia to USA
Welcome
Yesterday we flew from Perth to Portland.
The first flight took us to Singapore. It wasn’t too bad, only about 4.5 hours, and I slept most of the way. As you may know, Singapore Airport has some fun activities to indulge in if you have a layover there. We stopped in for a breath of forest air at the Moss and Fern Garden, next to one of the travelators in Terminal 2. I also visited the Cactus Garden in Terminal 1 which has a modest collection of cacti and succulents, and also doubles as a smoking deck.
The Cactus Garden which houses both real and steel cacti.
The angel wings ride.
Testing out the heat sensor as we board our flight out of Singapore.
The next leg was 14.5 hours. We flew above the Philippines and Indonesia, and below Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, before setting out across the expanse of the North Pacific Ocean. It’s hard to know which meal was really breakfast on a day that had more than one morning but I’m going with the breakfast meal that was served a couple of hours before reaching San Francisco.
I had Nasi Lemak - a chicken curry with crispy fried fish and peanuts, served with white rice and square eggs. On the side there was raspberry yoghurt and a bread roll.
The approach into San Francisco was quite beautiful. The sun was climbing over a crisp winter morning and coastal fog was visible creeping across the landscape. The landing itself was scary though. We descended through fog for quite a few minutes and it only cleared a couple of seconds before we touched the runway. It’s good to know that ILS works when it needs to.
Our immigration experience was fairly painless and the lines were much shorter than you experience coming into LAX. Something we hadn’t experienced before was passport purgatory, which claimed to Jon’s passport. The document is enclosed in a locked plastic container and returned to you while you go to get the carnet signed, and there the immigration officers retrieve once the paperwork is done.
The small plastic container that temporarily housed Jon’s passport.
We took the AirTrain to terminal 2 for our connecting flight. Quite a nice public transport experience, and free, unlike JFK’s AirTrain. Our connecting flight wasn’t for another five hours so Jon, Liz, and I headed out for some recreation while Tristan stayed at the airport to grab some extra shut-eye.
You guessed it! We went bouldering. What a pleasant experience it was to stretch out our muscles on climbing wall after the confines of an airplane. Not an insignificant detail in the decision-making process to come here to was the opportunity to shower and change our clothes.
Jon headed out for a walk and left Liz and I to climb. He saw many old buildings including Building 103, pictured below, a steam power plant for shipbuilding operations.
Building 103.
We headed back to the airport in the afternoon for our final flight. SFO’s Terminal 2 provided me one of the more pleasant airport experiences in recent memory. The spaces are wide open and there is lots of hanging art. My favourite feature though is the water refill station which dominates the concourse as you exit security screening. The station has six sensor-operated taps: two with hot water, two with chilled water, and two with ambient water. Technically ambient water is supposed to refer to untreated water from a river, lake, or groundwater, but my guess is that this was filtered room-temperature water, which I was very happy with.
The final flight was only an hour and forty minutes and featured some beautiful scenery. Tristan took this lovely snap of Mount Shasta, the 4km tall volcano located at the southern end of the Cascade Mountains.
Finally we arrived at our destination, Portland, Oregon, the port city with a population of 650,000. It was a brisk winter evening and we were grateful for the outdoor heaters in the taxi waiting zone. We checked into our hotel and managed to stay awake just long enough for a quick dinner and the walk back to our rooms.
