Proper preparation prevents poor
performance... if there was an award for overachieving when it comes to
preparing, I’d be a world champion by now. In an undiagnosed OCD kind of way,
I’ve well and truly outdone myself. Keep in mind I’m an institutionalized
academic who’s lived an insular life in a confined 10 kilometer radius, so
you’d understand that the urge to break out has been enormous. So where to
begin?
I don’t quite remember when Michelle canvassed
the idea of me joining her A team to go to Lake Tahoe to swim but she did and I
jumped at it. The timing was near perfect. My children are well old enough to
deal with life without me as they’re twenty and eighteen and my hubby is a ‘go
get it’ kind of person when it comes to allowing me to have the freedom to do
my own thing. How lucky am I ? He has seen me bolt through life at a rate of
knots and knows I’m on a trajectory straight up; this shift has been gathering
speed for a couple of years now.
Book the Flights.
More often than not, I’m a work backwards kind
of person. So before I even had a new passport, I had booked my flights. The A
team were already messaging back and forth, looking for commitments and there
was no time like the present to jump into the deep end. So I visited a mutual
friend’s wifey who was a travel agent, went along with my itinerary and we
booked five flights, and surprisingly added in an extra few days exploring at
the end.
So the plan was:
* Fly Melbourne to Brisbane to meet Michelle and stay with her the night.
* Fly Brisbane - Los Angeles with the A team the next day and then
grab a connecting flight the same day from L.A. to San Francisco.
* From there drive to Lake Tahoe and stay for 7 days.
* Drive to Yosemite National Park to stay for two nights and hike to
Half Dome, a 30 km strenuous hike
* Drive on to San Fran where we all split up: some go home, some stay
on and travel else where, and I decide to put my big girls pants on and do
three days solo in San Fran before I travel home on my own. Holy freakin moly....
I was really doing this!
Because we’d started plans so early, I was lucky
to book my five flights for $1,100.00
The extra stay in San Fran blew costs out
because whether you book for one body or two, all rooms are twin share, never
the less it was an incredible opportunity I was giving myself. Plus I got show
some some level of independence by travelling for at least some of the time on
my own.
The airport thing is my biggest concern, nothing
says ‘stress me out’ more than the thought of a strip search because it’s easy
to imagine yourself featuring in an episode of Boarder Security. Solo female in
a foreign country with no freakin idea what she’s doing... god my hands are
just clammy thinking about it. Breathe.... breathe, rookies do this every day 1000
times over. You’re not special Nicole.
Reflecting back, I think going to a travel agent
is one of the smartest things I did when preparing for this trip. It’s a no
mess no fuss way to organize things and if you’re a little highly strung,
advice was just an email away. Natalie from Flight Centre at Mordialloc was
incredible and highly adept with dealing with rookies like me.
Passport Woes.
I got the ball rolling on my new passport in
February, seven months out from travelling. My last one was outdated by
fourteen years so it was back to the drawing board for me, I couldn’t even use
my old one to vouch for myself. And as per true Chester style, it was not
without its issues; nothing ever seems to be straight forward. Before I
actually applied, I had to obtain a registered copy of my marriage certificate
from Births, Deaths and Marriages. Why it took three months, I have no idea but
it did and that meant there were a lot of stressful, sleepless nights waiting
for it to arrive. There was a point where I actually for a short time amount of
time, considered that maybe I wasn’t really married at all and that maybe the
church hadn’t sent in our paper work twenty-five years ago! Imagine that...
#marriednotmarried. Anyway, three months after I started the process it did
finally arrive and I got the passport process started very soon afterwards.
Once upon a time you had to fill in forms with a
black or blue pen only and if you wrote outside of the boxes you had to start
again. Now everything is paperless and online, just hop on to www.passports.gov.au , have your birth certificate, your drivers licence, Medicare card, spouse details if
you’re married (yes officially I am now! ) parents’ names and a friend to vouch
for you and well you’re done! As I was blowing into a brown paper bag with a
lack of trust in the process being straight forward and painless, I paid $215
extra, on top of $293 for a ten year passport ( because who wants to go through
this every five years) to have my passport processed in three days. I went to
the Australian Post outlet around the corner from home on a Saturday morning
(no appointment needed) to have my passport photos taken (ugh!) and it was
lodged there and then, after sighting my documents. Sure enough, Wednesday
morning at 10am, it arrived by registered mail at home. It was worth paying the
extra money for the peace of mind, especially after the marriage certificate
saga of 2019; I simply didn’t have three months to bugger around.
VISA or ESTA?
As I was travelling to the U.S of A for less
than ninety days, I didn’t need to apply for a visa, but I did need to apply
for an ESTA. This was an electronic visa application that is done very
officially on an American government website, for all its Trump’d up glory.
This application did take forty-eight hours to approve (it used to be a three
minute turn around last year) but terrorism on US soil is frequent and the fear
of people crossing borders is real. I would hate for my chocky Mediterranean
skin to be mistaken for a border crossers.
The A team are an eclectic bunch of middle aged
professionals from a very diverse background. All are very well travelled. Team
Captain Bondi is the organizing man, he heads up the email chain, sourced the accommodation we are staying at
in Lake Tahoe, ( an incredible house set in amongst the trees of Tahoma),
advised our options for accommodation at Yosemite, had arranged for our hiking permits to Half Dome) and
generally advised and set the itinerary. Bondi also organized a large boat for
us to use a couple of days after the race, to complete a team relay crossing of
the lake for 20 kilometers or just sight see around the lake if the weather
tuned on us. Michelle, Bondi and I all competed together in a Rottnest Island
team a few years ago and are well adept at this type of swimming.
Reasons to Travel.
Bondi and Michelle did the trip to the Lake Tahoe
Open Water swim last year, Bondi coming out the victor between the two of them,
it was going to be a ding dong battle for first this year, and that’s not
including the other A team top guns. We feel the need, the need for speed!
Chances are if Michelle beats Bondi, we’ll all be coming back next year to
watch the show down, I’m putting my money on Michelle!
Speaking of the swim, this is of course the very
reason we are all travelling to the US, a perfect excuse for any sporty
swimmer. Seasonally, it’s just coming out of Summer there, so the temperature
in the lake is expected to be around eighteen degrees. Considering I’m still
swimming here in Port Phillip Bay over winter where it’s balmy ten degrees,
this will be a walk in
the park for me. My
Queensland counterparts however, may find it a touch chilly to start with.
The swim itself has a range of distances: 1/2
mile, 1 mile and and a 2.4 mile which I am entering, wearing a wetsuit. I will
have to battle a bit of jet lag and it’s fresh water so I might as well use the
buoyancy to my advantage and have a solid race.
This is my first international race; I’ve
travelled and competed in five states of Australia ( Victoria, New South Wales,
Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia) and I am hoping to compete
in the Northern Territory in the elusive Fanny Bay swim and hit Tasmania for
the Dark Mofo in the next year of two. That’s
the beautiful thing about our sport, it takes you to incredible places,
some of them right on your own door step.
Double down with a hike thrown in.
The hike to Half Dome will also be a huge
challenge, I’ll fit but most of my training is non weight bearing so thirty kilometers
is going to hurt me. Never the less, what goes up must come down and I figure
if I can get the first half done cleanly, the later part should just roll along
on its own. Paul (hubby) and I have done a fair bit of hiking in preparation
for this, last school holidays we went to the Grampians National Park in the
high country and scaled the well-known Pinnacles and the lesser known Boronia
Peak Lookout. The views were breath taking and the achievement wonderful, it’s
been great being able to share this part of the preparation with him, for he is
a land bearer and not a water baby like I am.
Breaking out on my own.
My final three days in San Francisco are the
continual source of my deep breathing and heightened anxiety. Whilst I’m most
excellent on my own, being in a big city without comforting human contact and
an ear to bash if I need to trouble shoot something, is my biggest concern and
it will in fact, be one of my other big achievements post arrival home.
Basically I’m just going to have to learn to be brave.
I’ve had my L plates on for this trip for some
time. April this year I flew to Brisbane to stay with Michelle and practiced
being a solo tourist; you know, learnt how to not look lost, learnt how to
casually consult Google maps without it blaring out “ In 400 meters you have
reached your destination.”, used public transport and even caught my first
Uber. I know right? I’m soooo cultured and well-travelled now. And I suppose
that’s been one of my biggest lessons, just moving out of my very confined
world and learning how to be a nomad, embracing all of the ease that technology
and life offers us now. It’s never really been easier to travel, and yet it’s
had a layer of complicated that I’ve just had to come to terms with.
A lot has changed in 25 years...
Let’s not forget that the last time I travelled
overseas was on my honey moon twenty-five years ago, where homeland terrorism
wasn’t even labelled or recognized, where mobile phones didn’t exist, where
Uber wasn’t even a real world, where if you needed a map you physically carried
one around in your hand and you unfolded as you needed it. It was just so
simple then. We didn’t even have a credit card, travel cards weren’t a thing
and as my husband reminded me, we just changed our Aussie dollars at a tiny
exchange on the main drag of Villa after we arrived. No providing incomes or
showing bank account statements to show you could support yourself.
When you travelled overseas, your family just
accepted that they couldn’t contact you for the two weeks while you were away
and no one ever really believed you would be unsafe anyway so there WAS no need
to check in. These days if you haven’t been active on messenger for a day,
people think you’ve fallen off the perch. It’s a real life oxymoron... travel
has never been easier and yet it can be so bloody complicated all at once. It’s
just so multilayered.
Advice.
Some of the most wonderful sources off advice
and information has come from my work colleagues. They are a bunch of fifty
plus Mornington Peninsula residences who have covered every continent apart
from Antarctica (and I want to be the one to eventually claim that prize.) They
know me almost as well as my family, know my free spirit and adventurous ‘grab
life by the balls’ side and have seen me slowly work towards getting myself off
the insular peninsula. I’ve held court more than once at the staff room table
and thrown questions out there for workshopping: how do I exchange my money?
Best credit card? Best type of luggage to buy? How much to I tip? What about
sales tax? etc. They’ve been nothing but generous and caring.
Moral dilemmas in the teaching world.
The decision to take long service leave is not
taken lightly, for we know every teacher in the country has heard “Oh you
bloody teachers get twelve weeks holiday every year, why do you have to go in
school time?” despite the weekly occurrence of families themselves taking
holidays during school time to save money by not travelling at peak time. My
profession is ladened with these double standards where the customer is always
right and I HAVE no rights. I took three days extra days off after the term one
holidays and was welcomed back by a parent half an hour before I was due to
start in class with “ Oh I heard you were being slack and taking some extra
time off!” To which I curtly replied back “No, just taking three days long
service leave that I’m entitled to.” The judgements are ruthless. Throw in that
I’ve experienced intimidation and bullying from older students and violence in
the classroom and I know I’ve absolutely earnt the right to take time off
during school term. I am no different to any other government worker, and yet
because I work with children I’m expected to always place them first, despite
my safety or wellbeing having been strongly compromised. I love my job but I
love my health and safety more and don’t fancy having a book thrown at my head
or being kicked by a student. Nope... I come first sometimes. And that means
holidays during term time...
