Day 2 - What Happened To Wednesday?

After 31 hours of travel (door to door), 21 hours in the air and 10,100 miles I arrived in Australia on time Thursday morning. The flights were good except for some pretty good turbulence for a couple of hours while flying over the equator and Fiji.  Customs was a breeze thanks to ePassport and electronic facial recognition (bypassed a very long line), I got my bag and met my great friend Rick Elliott who had just arrived (perfect timing).  We threw my bag in the car and were off to deal with rush hour traffic.

I was very tired having slept only 4 hours in the past 56, so no sight seeing today (the weather was quite bad as well with rain and fog) but Rick did point out a few things as we drove back to his house. When we arrived back at his place I took a short nap while Rick did some work.  After that we picked up his youngest daughter Natasha from her singing lesson and took her to her first guitar lesson (yay!). We stayed during her first lesson and it was so cool.  With her music and performing arts background she picked up everything the instructor said very quickly and I couldn't help to think of Candy Creamer as I watched her guitar teacher begin teaching.  He had her playing and singing in no time.....she has a great voice.

After that we came back and had a delicious dinner that Rick prepared on the grill on his beautiful deck....

After dinner Rick, his wife Linda, Natasha and I went out to do a little shopping.  Tasha was looking for school shoes and I was looking for some breakfast groceries.  We came home, made some hot tea and Rick's other children, Josh and Zara, joined us as we watched a recent episode of Modern Family where they visited Australia.  It was funny and provided a few ideas for things to see and do.

As I mentioned above, we didn't get to do any sight seeing today but I did manage to take one photo from the car to use in today's "Where is Stephen".....

                                                   Where Am I?

Oh, so what's up with today's title you ask....I'm sure many of you know that crossing the international date line is kind of like traveling through the Twilight Zone.  We left LA at 10 PM on Tuesday. We arrived in Australia 15 hours later and it was 8 AM on Thursday!  So my Wednesday only lasted for roughly 8 hours from midnight to the international data line.  :-)

Here's a pretty cool link that explains more about this if you are interested:  The International Date Line, Explained