The Wombat Press: The First Leg of our Big American Adventure: Brisbane and Los Angeles

We stopped over in Brisbane for a few days to see Mick's family and give us a bit of a breather between getting off the trans-Australian Perth-Brisbane flight and getting on the trans-Pacific Brisbane-Los Angeles flight (13.5 long, unrelenting hours). The visit was lovely but unfortunately I didn't take a single photo. My photos start at the Brisbane Airport waiting for our departure to Los Angeles.

Just before we got on the plane. Augie enjoyed watching the ground crew work.

Here he is somewhere over the Pacific Ocean raisins in hand, headphones on and watching his then-favourite thing on the iPad: videos of himself. Before our trip, I had loaded up the iPad with nearly every video we had of him. This proved a bit futile because, somewhere over the Pacific, he discovered Bob the Builder and thus his love of videos of himself fell by the wayside.

Happy Traveller

After a while, the iPad got boring and he resorted to Mick's iPhone - also full of much entertainment.

He did, thankfully, fall asleep eventually. He ended up having about 5 or so hours of broken sleep, which beat our October 2011 flight from Brisbane to LA (when he was 10 months old), where he slept for only about 1.5 hours. That was an extremely loooong flight. This year's was much easier by comparison. He did wake a couple of times this trip and, boy, was he GRUMPY. We started calling him The Wolverine because when he woke, he'd lash out at us - hitting, yowling and trying to bite if we got close.

We arrived in LA at 6am and, unfortunately, couldn't get into our hotel room until 1pm. So we went to Venice Beach. The day was particularly hot and we had that disgusting feel of just getting off a long-haul flight. Augie, naturally, wanted to look in every bin there. Mick and I both wanted to barf.

Augie and Blue Bear on Venice Beach. Blue Bear is our travelling bear. He does everything from grocery store runs to round-the-world adventures. Ever since Augie's bestie Flat Bear spent the night in an Oriental Supermarket, Blue Bear, who is far more dispensable, has been the travelling bear.