Our Brisbane "Break"

We sat on the plane for nearly two hours until a series of confusing and sometimes contradictory statements finally led to our release. Below you can see us poised at the door with an crew of airport employees and police officers ready to guide us to the transit area and back into the international section of BNE.

It's a modern and quite beautiful airport.

It would take a lot of concentration to spend five or six hours admiring all this architecture, and we were fortunate to have access to two Star Alliance lounges, Air New Zealand's Koru Club (where we both took showers), followed by the Silver Kris Lounge of Singapore Airlines.

A one-hour plane later, we arrive in a virtually deserted SYD international area, and are riding the airport train into downtown Sydney almost before we know it. We're checked in and freshened up at the Sydney Hilton, and now it's time to go out and enjoy Friday night in this beautiful city with our first stop the Hilton Executive Lounge for Happy Hour.

Cheers!