Drumroll please.....

........................we made it!

We got unstuck at GSP and made the 4:20 PM to ATL.  This flight in itself was an adventure, as we pathetically had to make a public announcement requesting some kind soul to let us store our bags under his or her seat.  Luckily the 3 guys behind us helped us out.  While we got on the 4:20, it was delayed until 5:13, giving us an arrival time of 6:12, a mere 28 minutes before our connecting flight was scheduled to leave.

Needless to say, I took off as soon as I could after we landed for the next concourse and barely squeezed through the gates, yelling at them that "Mary Ruff is on her way, don't close the doors!!"  So we both made it (just barely!) and we ran into Chris, another one of our friends.   From here on out, it was pretty smooth sailing.  A fairly quick five hour flight to LA and then we met up with Elyse (my best friend from Ohio).  We had about an hour to kill in the airport before we found out that the standby passenger list would be very limited due to lots of heavy baggage.  It was a close call, but we made it.

Now I thought this was going to be a 14 hour flight but we boarded that plane at 5:30 PM Aussie time and didn't land until 8:40 AM.  It was a long night and I didn't sleep more than 2 or 3 hours but it went fairly quick I guess and Lindsey and I got to sit together.  Oh yes, and I also got to sit next to Michelle, a nice Japanese woman who lives in Australia who insisted on watching movies over my shoulder.  She was precious, especially while she did bicycle kicks from her seat.

Funny little story from the flight that may make me look like an idiot, but it's still funny enough to share:  I thought my TV was broken for the first 12 hours because I tried to watch a movie and the volume didn't work.  While Lindsey slept, I set both of our TV's to watch the same movie and plugged into her volume, which was stuck on an extremely loud setting.  I held one earbud up to one ear and tried not to cringe at the insanely loud noises.  It wasn't until the last hour of the flight that we realized that I had plugged into the wrong TV initially and all of ours did, in fact, work.  I had jacked up the volume on mine because my volume was low so when we went to listen to hers, it was stuck on full blast.  Whoops...

I can already tell I'm going to have to let Lindsey write these blogs.  I write wayyyy too much but I just have so many stories to tell!  Everything else has been good...prices are insane for everything, the internet is hardly available.  We walked 15 minutes to the Uni Hub, which is where we are right now.  We met Brandi, our other roommate, and we love her.  And our house is adorable.  We have great little rooms and there are 4 levels.  (Pictures will be coming sometime soon...)

We are going to the beach either today or tomorrow, depending on how much longer we can keep our eyes open.  The views here are breathtaking, even from the balcony off of my room.  We live at a place called "The Hill" for a reason...let's just say that we are all going to have the most muscular legs we can imagine by the time we leave.  I have never seen so many hills all together.  The weather is hot, we don't have air conditioning, but it gets a little cooler at night.

So I guess I will wrap it up now for the sanity of everybody involved.  Like I said, you all can enjoy much wittier, concise posts from Lindsey in the future...but who knows, my brain may overflow onto these pages again and you can just sigh and enjoy every nitty gritty detail of our complicated, beautiful, crazy, unpredictable Oz lives. :)