Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

Oy! Oy! Oy!



Good evening everyone! It is Tuesday, the 21st of July, and currently 6:39 P.M. I am sorry for the delay in posting this, but it has been one interesting and eventful past 24 hours.

First I promise I have plenty of pictures--starting with a picture of the amazing moon at 5 A.M. Sunday morning right before we left for St. Louis Lambert Airport. The traveling went well--I slept almost the whole way until we stopped for breakfast in Grafton (I think...). It was right where the Illinois and Mississippi River met and the scenery was beautiful. The road went right along the river the rest of the way to St. Louis and I learned what palisades are--the rock wall things by a river :).

At Lambert Airport I met one other Down Under participant. Justin was from Missouri and was traveling with both of his parents. His older brother had gone two years before with his mom for cross country. My parents and I wandered around for the next two hours before I finally decided I better go through security. I have to admit I like the spaciousness of the Moline Airport or the excitement and view of O'Hare much better than the cluastrophia and dreariness of Lambert Airport, but oh well, they get the job done.

For the rest of the morning, afternoon, and evening I tagged along with Justin and his parents as we flew into Pheonix and then onto LAX. On the way to Pheonix, Justin and I sat by the Arizona State University Women's Basketball and Arizona Diamondbacks announcer. He was a pretty neat fellow and was very good at recruiting for his home state :). He mentioned that ASU was going to be playing a courtesy game at Yale in November and invited me to come and see him at the broadcast table. Might be a thought...

Made it to LAX by 4:30 but Justin's mom, being somewhat of a veteren, was in charge of picking up a few other kids. We eventually did make it to Terminal 4 where we walked in to see over 100 different players and supports lounging about in various sorts of discomfort. Some had arrived at 11 that morning and our plane was not leaving until 11:20 P.M. The six or so hour lay over was plenty for me, I can't even imagine twelve hours!!

Then came the plane. It was MASSIVE. It was a 747 and that baby was humongous. It was two levels, first class on top, and I believe I overheard an attendant say that they were almost filled to capacity for the night with 900 people!

The fact that we had been traveling all day already definitely helped in being able to not really think about the fact that you are not only flying over the Pacific Ocean, but that you will be spending the next fourteen hours doing so. They actually fed us supper probably somewhere in the midnight vicinity West Coast time. I did watch a movie, but after that, I was out. It was pretty cold on the plane, but they gave us blankets, socks, pillows, and all sorts of things. They also came around with coffee, hot tea, or hot chocolate after supper! I had some hot chocolate to go along with my movie and it even had marshmallows!!

My neck really wasn't too sore and I had an aisle seat so my legs didn't even get that bad. It was dark the entire flight so we didn't get much of a view. Monday literally (!!) flew by!! And by the time we arrived in Brisbane, it was 6:30 A.M. on Tuesday (today).

Everyone on my team made through customs without any delay and once everybody got through we all met in this lobby area of the airport (which was pretty nice). We could exchange our currency there if we wanted to, and with the exchange we actually make a little bit of money. It doesn't really amount to much though because things are priced just enough higher that it basically evens out.

We broke up into two groups and boarded two different coach busses that took us to two different practice facilities. Oh! When we were landing the pilot told us it was a lovely 50 degrees out. I don't know if it got much past 73 today. But let me tell you, that was nothing compared to the temperature in that gym! You could almost see your breath! That place was ODing on A/C! The facility my team and three boys' teams practiced at was the one that we will be using for the tournament on Saturday and Sunday.

So my team has two girls from Lane Tech, which is this huuuuge school in Chicago. The coach is also from there. Then there are three girls from Kansas. Then me. One of the girls flew in a few days earlier to Melbourne to stay with some family, so this morning at practice we only had five people. That was a bit difficult for trying to have a basketball practice. And until my fellow 6 footer friend from Kansas arrived, I was the only one on the team above 5'8". No joke. Including the coach. One girl has to be close to 5'4". The girls here for the most part are actually pretty small. There are a lot of guards here and probably about ten or twelve true posts. I was just glad when I heard Jade was my height!

After practice we all went out to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe. Then we had our meeting with the VP of the organization. Tonight we have a ten o'clock curfew but after I finish writing this I am going to craaash. The rest of the girls are out shopping. It's only 7:05 now, but it is already really dark and feels like at least 9 or 10.

Ugh so I'm on the business computer and my time ran out and I had to go buy some more. Thankfully this website is fantastic and automatically saves these dealios for you. Whew.

I had written a dandy conclusion, but it disappeared so I'm just going to go with the last part:

Over and Out for now. Wildlife sanctuary tomorrow.