100 hours on the ground in Sydney (and many in the air/on the tarmac)

I am just back from a quick but mostly cool trip to Sydney, AustraliaI I gave a speech for a conference at the convention center there. I would have given the trip 10/10 until the trip home, but I am trying to keep that part in perspective!

I’d been to Sydney once before in my life. I spent a long weekend there in college when I was a study abroad student at the University of Melbourne. A friend and I took an overnight bus up to Sydney and saw the sights (including seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the opera house). But obviously that was…a while ago.

Sydney is a long way away for a 22-minute speech. My hosts were willing to pay for four nights in a hotel so I wound up tacking on a buffer day before and a day after my responsibilities for the conference. (I guess I could have stayed longer but there is a lot going on at home as well.) There are no direct flights from the east coast (yet – there may be one in late 2027). So on Friday Aug 21 I flew from Philadelphia to Dallas and then left Dallas at 10:55 p.m. central time, arriving in Sydney around 6:30 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd (crossing the international date line). I will admit that connecting flights make me anxious, but there was no way around it. Fortunately, the first leg went fine. We took off a bit late but made up most of the minutes. I made it to QF 8 in plenty of time.

QF 8 is officially listed as a 17-hour flight. It did not take that long — our time in the air was about 15:45. I’m doing a post for my Substack newsletter in a few weeks on how I spent those almost 16 hours in the air. I’m happy to report that I didn’t get to complete filling time mode until the last 4 hours (and really, the last 2 in particular).

But all time passes, including time in the air. I’ve come to see flying as a necessary evil, and given how far some of my recent trips have been (Newark to Hawaii, Newark to Tokyo, Dallas to Sydney) now a sub-4 hour flight feels like almost nothing.

And the reason to fly? The world is a magical place, and it’s amazing that in less than 24 hours you can go from Philadelphia to Sydney. There’s a Dallas flight every night so you could literally decide to go to Sydney on any given day. I will not be doing that but it’s funny to think that you could.

Sydney is a truly gorgeous city. It was a bit surreal riding from the airport (on the left side of the road) and seeing bare trees, but it is winter there. The weather was pretty mild — I think of Sydney as being kind of like Los Angeles for latitude and so it was really early spring. I stayed at the Sofitel Darling Harbour near the convention center and spent a lot of my time exploring that area.

I had no responsibilities my first day (my buffer day) so on Sunday morning after checking into my hotel, I grabbed a shower and got breakfast, got my badge from the conference, and then went exploring. I wound up walking several miles — through town toward the botanical gardens, and then down the path to see the Opera House. The sky really made it all look amazing (see the photo). I then walked all the way back to Darling Harbor and my hotel. I tried to nap but I’d had coffee at breakfast and it wasn’t happening. So I rested for a while and then went back out to the nearby Sea Life Aquarium.

I worried at first that this was a bit of a tourist trap, and the upstairs exhibits weren’t particularly amazing, but then you descend to a full shark tank and see a dugong, so that was cool. You could walk through another tunnel where the most giant ray I have ever seen swam over me. So I enjoyed the place more than I thought I would!

After, I went back to my hotel and did some work. I grabbed a burger from a nearby place (Betty’s Burgers — apparently it’s an Australian institution because people would remark when they saw me with the bag in the hotel elevator). Then I did a bit more work and started crashing at approximately 6:30 p.m. I fell asleep at 7 p.m.

Obviously this was going to be trouble, but with one wake-up I did make it to 3 a.m. I came to like my early jet-lagged mornings in my hotel room. I’d make myself coffee and I got a lot of work done! Then when the sun came up (6:20) I’d go run, then shower and get breakfast.

On Day 2 I had rehearsals, but not until mid-day. So in the morning after a lovely run around the harbor, I decided to go to the Wild Life zoo, which was right next to the aquarium. Again, I wasn’t sure how great this would be but they had wallabies, wombats, a cassowary, crocodiles, koalas, kangaroos, and a wide variety of snakes. So I saw everything that I would have wanted to see. The zoo was almost completely empty on a Monday morning too (unlike the aquarium on Sunday), so I got to just watch the animals for quite a while. When you sit long enough one will inevitably move and it is quite cool for someone used to seeing quadruped animals move their legs in a more galloping fashion to see them hop.

After the zoo trip I had rehearsals for my main stage presentation. The hall where I was speaking was positively cavernous (seating for several thousand) so that was pretty cool. My “handler” did a good job getting me everywhere I needed to be (I find it funny to have a handler/host but it was a huge conference — I could have gotten lost easily). After we finished I saw that the Art Gallery of New South Wales was still open for a bit, so I hopped in an Uber to get there. It’s right by the botanical garden but this was a lot more convenient than walking there!

I don’t know much about Australian artists but I enjoyed seeing some of the names that came up again and again (like Grace Cossington Smith) and getting to know their work. The museum also has an extensive collection of both historic and modern Aboriginal art.

After a happy 90 minutes there I walked past the Opera House again (wading past all the barriers being set up for the Sydney marathon, which is this weekend). I decided to stop for an early dinner at a place on that harbor where you could see the Harbour Bridge. With my fish and chips I ordered a “VB” (Victoria Bitter — you say “Vay-Bay” though I didn’t, because I’m obviously American and that would be weird). This was my drink of choice when I was in college in Melbourne and it was fun to drink it for old time’s sake!

(Though I mentioned ordering this to my handler and some other people and got a laugh — I guess it is more of a college drink, kind of like if I went to a bar as an adult and ordered Milwaukee’s Best. Though trust me it tastes a lot better than Beast.)

I walked back again, this time as it was getting dark. I made it to 8 p.m. before falling asleep. That meant I was up at 3:30 a.m. Progress.

I didn’t have time to run in the morning on my third day (Tuesday) because I had an early call. We went backstage and I got my hair and make-up done. I was on stage for my 22-minute speech — 9:07 to 9:29 — and I’m happy to report I ended 30 seconds under the buzzer. You never want the time management speech to go long! I think it went well. The rest of the day I had various other conference activities like a meet and greet where people could take photos with me and then a reception. I did manage to get to the gym for a 30-minute run in the afternoon.

My last full day — Wednesday — I woke up and went for a longish (3.5 mile) run around the harbor. Then, after breakfast, I went to the Australian National Maritime Museum, which was just a 5-minute walk from the hotel. The exhibits themselves were fine — they had some Viking treasure, and I enjoyed the exhibition on maps. Europeans really had no idea that Australia was there in the early 1600s, but there were more and more hints. For instance a very famous shipwreck and mutiny happened there, and in the course of this some of the survivors mapped some of the coast line. Then by the early 1700s the de Wit map has most of the coast line of Australia and New Zealand charted. These maps are never 100 percent accurate (I collect some old maps myself) yet I still think it’s amazing how accurate they are given that they couldn’t see anything from above.

The real draw of the museum, however, is the ships outside in the harbor. I went on a submarine, a destroyer, and a replica of Captain Cook’s ship. On a Wednesday morning there was almost no one there so I could look at whatever I wanted without feeling rushed (and without getting stuck longer than I wanted to be…I can’t imagine living on a sub — they make me so claustrophobic, though I guess they’re not that different from airplanes…).

After I visited Abbey’s bookstore — an extensive book store not far from Darling Harbour. I spent a lovely hour there just looking at various titles. Then the rest of the day I mostly worked with a little walking around — including getting one more VB from a restaurant on the water. I fell asleep around 8:30 p.m. and slept until 4:30 a.m. — and then it was time to go home, so the fact that I really never switched over so much is what it is!

The trip home was long and…hard. It started fine – the flight from Sydney took off on time and while I knew we were potentially going around storms, it looked like we’d get in more or less on time. I read for a bit and worked for a bit, and then around 5 p.m. Sydney time (5 hours into the 15 hour flight) it just got bumpy. It was not the worst turbulence I’ve been in certainly. But it was just relentless. Like the next 5.5 hours it really never stopped. I watched these Will Smith nature documentaries for a while. Then I tried to sleep (7 p.m.) and I know I went in and out for about 3 hours because some parts went faster. But I was aware of a lot of that time. Finally around 10:30 I really did go to sleep for the next 3 hours or so, using my ear plugs to drown out the loud snoring of the guy next to me (why….). We got to the gate at 1 p.m. central time in Dallas, and my flight to Philly left at 2:26 so it was a little tight for an international connection, but I had Global Entry now, so I breezed through that, and security. I had to connect terminals so that took another 10 minutes, but I made it to my gate by 1:45, which is when the flight would have boarded. Philly was in an air traffic delay pattern though (lots of weather and such) so we were delayed a bit. We did get in the air around 3:15 central, meaning we would land 7 p.m. eastern.

And we did! And then…we sat. First, it was that we had to wait for traffic to clear to get across the runways. Then some other plane was given our gate. Then we didn’t have a gate. I knew we were in trouble when we went off to some far corner of the airport to park — airplane purgatory. You wait there for a while. The pilot had no idea what was going on. “Ops” as he called it was in meltdown mode and not taking his call. We finally pulled into a gate at 9:30 p.m. — 2.5 hours after landing. We sat on the tarmac basically as long as the flight from Dallas.

Needless to say, I was a bit of a wreck at this point coming after 24 hours of travel. I felt so bad for my fellow passengers with connections — a lot of stuff out of Philly was canceled with the storm but there were people trying to make overnight flights to Europe. This was incredibly frustrating for everyone. I made it to my car at 9:50 (walking through the whole airport — I’d parked in the D garage since we were flying into C originally…but the gate we got was on the far end of the A terminal…) and was home at 10:25.

The good news is I did manage to sleep from 11-6, so perhaps I’m right back on east coast schedule! Anyway, recovering and digging out from not being home for 3 weeks today. And enjoying looking at the pictures. Sydney is really lovely — but I actually know I’m most likely going back in 2027 for something else. Not looking forward to the flying but I am looking forward to seeing that part of the world again!