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I sit at the window at Grind coffee shop at Cronulla Beach, in beautiful Australia. A smallish mug, filled with a flat white and topped with a heart, carved into its foam is brought to me on a saucer. I take a sip and hold the taste of espresso in my mouth for a few seconds, to savor this moment on my third trip back to Australia. I swallow the heated liquid, I sigh, I smile. This is one of the things I could barely wait to experience again.

We are into our first full day in Australia, and already, so much has happened. It is Saturday, and last night was the first time we slept in a bed since Tuesday night. Which sounds wrong, but the days get a little muddled together when traveling over that all-powerful International Date Line. I woke up this morning feeling fully refreshed, but by the time I had showered, dressed, and eaten breakfast, I was ready for a nap. Fair enough, though, since our yesterday was basically a full 45 hours. Time has no meaning for now, and I'm loving it.

When I was still in high school and even up until I took my first international flight, I dreaded flying. I would get next to no sleep the night before my flight because of fear. Now, I lose sleep because of my excitement. I love to travel. I love the check-in process, the security lines, sitting in the gate area while waiting for the plane to board. I love watching people as they travel, trying to guess at who is traveling for the first time. This trip, however, gave us a bit more stress than most. We had flown down to Oklahoma City to spend a week with my family before heading to California for our flight to Oz. While in Oklahoma, we bought our tickets to San Francisco. The plan was to book the tickets to San Fran a full day before our night flight from there, so we could explore the city a bit. Our Sydney flight left on Wednesday late night, so we booked our tickets for the Tuesday morning, ensuring our arrival into San Fran by lunchtime. This would give us plenty of time to see some sights.

On Monday morning, Steve and I decided to check in online for our flight from Oklahoma City to San Francisco. We had found an amazing deal on Priceline, but couldn’t quite figure out how to check in for a flight booked through them. After about 10 minutes of full frustration, I decided to look at the confirmation email once more, to see if we were missing any instructions. On the email, in bold blue letters, it read, “Your itinerary for flight from OKC to SFO September 22, 2009.” We had booked our tickets for a full week too late. Our flight from San Francisco to Sydney left on September 16. I yelled for Steve, showed him what we had done, and we stared at each other, trying to think of a way that the computer could be lying to us. This discovery was followed by several phone calls to the airline and $500 later, we were checked in and ready to fly the next day for San Francisco.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Not only was I excited and semi-nervous about the process of exploring a whole new city, but I kept thinking that maybe the computer was lying to us about our Sydney flight. What if we were already a week too late? All throughout that day, I had checked and rechecked the calendar, the times, the emails – everything that told us when we were leaving. And then, what if our alarm didn’t go off? What if we slept through our boarding time? It was a long night.

After all that thinking, I got up in the morning on time, and even remembered everything the first time out the door. My mom took us to the airport and we met my dad there to say goodbye. They waved us off, and we boarded the plane for Phoenix, where we had a 2-hour layover. We arrived in San Francisco at noon, gathered our luggage, and made our way through the confusion of the hotel courtesy shuttle system.

We arrived at our hotel, the Vagabond Inn, and waited behind another couple so that we could check in. My eyes wandered around the sunny room whose walls were made of windows. Outside, palm trees swayed in the warm breeze and the blue sky remained uninterrupted by any intrusive clouds. It was going to be a good day.

But then my eyes wandered to a sign that the hotel had in one of their windows. It said, “This hotel uses chemicals that cause birth defects, cancer, and other reproductive diseases.” I jabbed Steve in the side and pointed to the sign. He looked at me and smiled…there was really nothing else he could do. I knew I needed to find out what I needed to stay away from so that my children would come out with all of their fingers, instead of webbed feet or something. When it came our turn to check in, I gave the concierge our name, and she began the process of checking us in.

“So, what’s the chemical that causes all the birth defects?” I asked, in a forced casual voice. “Oh,” she said, “let me get you a brochure.” She opened the desk to look for one, but discovered they had run out. I asked her if there was just something that I should stay away from and she said, “It’s just that we allow people to smoke in the hotel vicinity.” I was never so relieved to hear about cigarettes.

We settled into our room and then decided to take the shuttle back to the airport to catch the Bay Area Rapid Transit train. The price to get into the city from the airport and back was a whopping $16.20 each. Shocking though that news was, we gave in and bought the tickets, jumped on the train, and listened as one of the workers tried to explain to an Asian couple which stop they needed to get off of in order to transfer to another line. They obviously didn’t know much English, and as the worker said to them, “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?” Steve let the guy know that we would tell them when they needed to exit the train.

The San Francisco BART line is loud, and it feels as though the train could jump the track at any moment. When the conductor would get on the loud speaker to let us know which station we were at, I was amazed that she could make every name for each stop fit into a one syllable, mumbled word. We finally arrived at the Embarcadero station, and unfortunately exited up the wrong stairway, which took us to the Financial District. We walked for about an hour before asking a local to point out the way to the bay, only to discover that we had been traveling in the wrong direction the entire time.

We finally made it to the bay, but by now, we were starving. We had planned on finding Pier 43 ½ where there was a ferry station that took people on tours around Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge. We decided to walk along the boardwalk and find some food while we looked for our pier. The smells ranged from the aromatic scents of Italian food, seafood, sewage, and fish water. We walked and walked and walked, and finally found Pier 1. So we walked some more, stopping along the way to peruse the menus of some very expensive restaurants. We traveled for about 2 hours, and finally made it to Fisherman’s Wharf, where our pier was located. We walked up to the ticket counter, where we were met with a sign that said CLOSED.

Discouraged and still extremely hungry, we decided to keep walking. We still had not seen any signs of the actual Golden Gate Bridge. We found some seafood places, but they were either too expensive, or too disgusting to temp us. We almost gave into one of the smaller vendors on the street when in the distance I saw a sign for an Italian restaurant. “Let’s go and see what they have to offer,” I said, and Steve agreed. While we were walking towards it, we could hear a man yelling something. He sounded like a baseball vendor trying to sell his products and we faintly heard “Golden Gate Bridge…Alcatraz…last tour of the night…$15.” Steve looked at me and asked if I wanted to go on the tour. My stomach fought against the tourist in me, and as we neared the man, I decided to take him up on his offer. My stomach could wait.

We paid the man, and boarded his dingy fishing boat, beautifully named Lovely Martha. About 30 other people were sitting throughout the boat. We found a seat near the middle of the back part of the boat, and laughed at how small the boat was and how ridiculous we felt. Would we make it through this cruise alive? We waited until all the seats were sold, and the captain and his cruise director (dressed in shorts and old t-shirts) boarded the vessel, untied us from the dock, and pushed us off. We headed first for the bridge, and along the way heard a history of the wharf, saw some seals sunbathing on a dock, were splashed by the waves that hit our boat as we made a wake, and got a glimpse of the “Full House”-like houses lining the bay.

As we neared the bridge, we realized that like so many other tourist moments in our relationship, this one was going to include fog. The bridge was covered in its own cloud. Nowhere else on the water or on the land was there fog; it was only around the bridge. We laughed at our luck, took some photos, and headed for Alcatraz. Steve invented a long, in-depth story about how he had been the only person to escape Alcatraz, and that when he got out, the guards tried to swim after him. He claimed that because he was so amazing, he was able to swim away, breaststroke style, while the guards swam free-style, unable to catch up to him. He apparently got to the shore, swam back to Alcatraz, and then back to the shore again, without the guards ever catching up with him. He was upset that I didn’t laugh.

After the boat docked again, we got off the boat, chilled by the wind, sticky from the salt water. My hair was a mess, my cheeks pink, and my toes were numb. We walked to the restaurant and found out there was a comedy stand-up night there, and we could both get in for $5. We couldn’t pass it up, so while we listened to sub-par comedians joke about their pretty average lives, we ate some great food and shared a bottle of red.

Afterwards, we decided we should head back to the BART station, so we could get back to the airport before the hotel shuttle was done for the night. We arrived with plenty of time, made our way to the shuttle waiting area, and as I picked up the phone to call the hotel to request the shuttle to be sent, Steve looked at me with panic in his eyes. “I think I just messed my pants,” he said. I thought nothing of it as he made his way back into the airport to use the bathroom. But as the shuttle pulled up, I began to wonder how my husband was going in the bathroom. I gave his phone a ring and told him the shuttle was here. “We have a mess on our hands,” he explained, “Ask the shuttle guy if he can wait for 5 minutes.” While it upset the poor man, he said he’d wait. I sat in the bus, watching for Steve. After about 3 minutes, I saw him running towards us. He hopped on the bus and sat on the seat, kind of on his leg. “What happened?” I asked. “That call could not have come at a worse time. I diarrhea-ed in my pants, and when you called me I was in the middle of a massive clean-up.” We laughed our way to the hotel, where Steve cleaned up and we soon fell asleep.

The next morning, we woke up slowly and checked out by 11 in the morning. Our plan was to check in with Qantas, getting rid of all of our luggage. We would then find some sort of transportation into a neighboring San Franciscan town where we would spend the day until about 7 pm when we would make our way back to the airport to go through security. Unfortunately, ours was the only flight Qantas had that day, so the check-in counter didn’t open until 6:45 that night. However, being the seasoned travelers that we are, we did not let that news upset us. We spent the day at a table in the airport’s food court and wasted the 7 hours reading, making a slide show for our Australian family, and eating. Time dragged by, and eventually it was time to check in.

Things went smoothly, and despite the fact that Steve looks much like a scary mountain man, we didn’t have to be wanded down or anything. We found our gate, sat for another 2 hours, and finally boarded the plane. We were delighted to find out that our seats were by themselves in the first row of economy, giving us plenty of leg room and denying us the need to climb over a stranger when we needed to use the bathroom throughout the flight.

We made our way over the enormous Pacific Ocean as we watched movies and tried, semi-successfully, to get some sleep. And as the sun finally caught up with us, we caught the sight of land. And slowly, the land became more distinct and buildings formed, and then we saw buildings that we recognized – the Opera House, the observation tower, and the Harbor Bridge. Steve pointed out my old suburb, and tried, yet again, to explain the layout of Sydney. We heard the wheels being lowered, and looked at each other in anticipation. “You happy to be home?” I asked, and Steve smiled in affirmation as our plane touched down.

More to come...