Brisbane: Christmas 2019
Started things off with a surprisingly edible "meal" at the United Club at LAX, a beautiful sunset flight to San Francisco, and a long layover-- enough time to leave the airport and explore one of the many new Chinese restaurants popping up all over the Bay Area. "wonderful" was packed but didn't have too long of a wait, and they, along with many others, are very close to SFO. Their smoked pork belly was solid, as was the chili crispy chicken, although a little too pricey to compete with 626, and not quite as tasty as the better places in 626 either. Still pretty solidm and orders of magnitude better than airport food.
Managed to just luck out into one of the last three seats in Polaris (business class) after boarding United flight 863 to Sydney. The big 777-300ER was pretty full for the holidays, so this was a very pleasant surprise. As was the terrific flight crew, who didn't seem to mind having to work on a holiday.
The transpacific flight was to be pretty boring, aside from a ton of turbulence. Fortunately was able to sleep through most of it, but both the outbound to Sydney and the inbound back to San Francisco were to be bumpy rides.