You'd think the last few legs of my journey would be straight forward, given all I've gone through already. Well, you'd be wrong. Last we left, I was sitting around in Orlando for a day. So let me pick from where we left off...

I got on the flight from Orlando to LAX knowing that I was on the standby list to get from LAX to Sydney. Can you imagine that? I also knew that if I didn't get on the LAX flight, I'd have a confirmed seat the next day on the same flight - so worst case scenario is I have another unexpected day in LA.

But that's not where the trouble started. The flight from Orlando to LAX had its own unique quirks. For one, they forgot to load in the movies, so instead of something I hadn't seen, I was going to see two movies I had seen - two movies I hated.

But that's not all.. they had no water. When I say no water, I mean -no- water. You go to the toilet and hit flush and there's a woosh of air only, no water. You hit the sink to clean your hands - no water. You're parched dry and you ask the stewardess for water - no water. It was also at this point that I crashed my iPod. It's backlight stayed on, it wouldn't turn off, you can't get at the batteries. So I had a glowing iPod slowly draining away all of its power. I couldn't even recharge it when I got to LAX because the charger is in my luggage.

Five hours later, I'm in LAX, one of the suckiest airports in America. Why the hell don't they have wifi? Okay, so I head off to the gate and sit around for a while. One good thing though - the guy back in Orlando has put the magic symbol on my standby ticket - BP5 - Boarding Priority 5. The highest you can get. This is what airport employees get my friends.

For the first time since I'd started enjoying the standby lists, I was told that it was highly likely I'd get on this flight. As the people started filing in to the plane I waited for my name to be called.. nope.. more people filed on... no call for my name.. so I went up. "Oh, you're Lucas aren't you. Yes we can get you on". One gets the impression that if I hadn't asked, I wouldn't have been on the flight.

Down to economy I go. Let us not forget that my seat on this flight yesterday (if I'd gotten here) would have been in first class. Hah. Down to economy I go, squashed in like sardines. We're about to take off and I hear that somebody else is trying to get an upgrade. So what the heck, if they can do it, I can do it. "Sorry sir, the doors are closed." The Perser comes up and I speel her my entire travel story - I'm getting pretty good at it by now. She calls back to LAX and they decide to upgrade me to business.

To my surprise, I had seen all this before. I thought business class was going to be special. What did I get? foot rest, reclining seat, personal TV, 50 channels, that sort of thing. Now where oh where had I seen this before? Bingo! British Airways - Economy class. That's right people, United's $6000 dollar business class seats are the same as British Airways' economy class.

13 hours of flight later.. or 20 if you're counting back to Orlando, I arrive on Australian soil.