Almost all my bike rides start with a trip to the airport to some far flung destination. This trip is departure from LAX to Melbourne Australia with a connecting flight to Adelaide where the ride segment to Melbourne starts.  The flight was on Qantas on one of their huge A380s. It the first time I've been on this type of aircraft and I just gotta say, the experience was wonderful. Boarded late in the evening and I was fast asleep before we even took off. An hour or so later, woke up to a late dinner then off to sleep again. The seats reclined to a decent angle, the cabin noise level was pretty low as well. I would recommend Qantas, even for economy.

The flight time was pretty long, almost 16 hours, but with sleeping, eating, watching 2 movies and reading a couple of chapters in of a book, I almost wish that it was a bit longer. A friend from work, Jim Lux, loaned me a book by Bill Bryson called "In a Sunburned Country". A fun book about Australia with references to many cities that we'll be biking thorough including Adelaide, Port Fairy, Melbourne and Sydney.

Check out the maps below this post. It contains the routes for the first 8 days of the ride. You can use the scroll at the bottom of the maps to view individual days of the "show all" indicator for all 8 days at once.