When you are looking for a trip to fill a few bucket list items, this one will do nicely. My wife and I had a number of things we wanted to do in our travels, and going to Australia and New Zealand were near the top of our list. Not just for the travel (24 hours in the air going and 17 in the air coming back - not including layovers), but to see a little bit of the countries and meet the people were a few of our bucket items. Seeing the wildlife and giving a koala a "hug" was near the top of my wife's Australia and New Zealand lists. Looking at the Southern Cross, penguins, kangaroos, and kiwis were included in my list. We checked them all off.

We started our trip from China. China, Texas that is. Then it was a short drive to Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston, Texas to start the journey. We had been warned to arrive three hours early given that it was an international flight and you had to have your "visa" in order to board a plane to Australia. We had obtained ours via the internet several months earlier and we were set to go. We booked to fly premium economy via Qantas. We found out that our first and third legs going to Perth, Australia would be in economy as there was no premium economy available on those two legs.

After a pretty tight and crowded flight (aboard a Bombardier CRJ-700 (CR7) V1) from IAH to LAX, I was ready to get off of that plane. It was a bit over 3-1/4 hours, but at 6'4" in height, there was insufficient seat room in the economy class rows. Ouch, my knees were sore. You have to change terminals on arrival at LAX to catch the international flight. We flew to LAX because I wanted to fly on an Airbus A380. Read more