Sunday, June 30 Depart for Australia Day 1
I arrived at RIC at 1:00pm and met up with my group at the check in area. Most of the members were together with their parents, but my dad dropped me off in a hurry because he had to go to work. I went about and found a group of my friends and we chatted mostly about what we anticipated most about the trip. After roughly an hour of waiting in the check in area we lined up in alphabetical order and checked our bags. We played Uno while waiting for our leaders to organize the airplane tickets and collected our passports. Then the parents took photos of the group right before we went up stairs, and through the security checkpoint. At three o’clock pm we boarded our Delta airplane and departed for Atlanta, Georgia. The plane ride went extremely smoothly and we touched down in Atlanta shortly before five o’clock pm. After having spent an hour in Atlanta we again departed for Los Angeles, California. Four hours and thirty minutes later we arrived in LA; we proceeded to the International Terminal, which required us to walk outside and enter a different building. While waiting to have our tickets checked by the people working at the Qantas desk, we met another People to People delegation from Maryland, and a football team from Arkansas going to Australia to train for the upcoming football season in the fall. The overlap duration at LA was four hours, and in those hours most of us proceeded to purchase dinner and walked around with their new friends to pass the time. Finally at midnight our plane departed LA for Sydney Australia.