It was a long haul into Dallas, Texas for the beginning of our trip.

Thanks to Mark for driving us to Melbourne on Tuesday night where we stayed close to the airport for our Wednesday morning flight.
Shuttle bus had us to the airport quickly and it wasn't long before we were checked in and ready to go. The boys were super excited about their first ever plane trip and the awesome guy who checked us in made it super easy by checking us right through so that we didn't need to pick up our luggage at Sydney. And then things started to fall apart a little. Apparently Tullamarine was down to one runway for both exiting and entering flights and because of that we landed in Sydney 40 minutes behind our scheduled landing time. Not too bad, we were 'expressed' through to make sure we made our connecting flight which was meant to be boarding at 12.15. At 12.30 they announced there was an "engineering issue" and that take off would be delayed. After two more such announcements we were finally able to board, about 3 hours later than we were meant to!
Despite the bad beginning, the flight was remarkably good though VERY long. Kaine managed to get a really good sleep but the rest of us are well and truly feeling exhausted.
Finally reached our hotel at about 7.30pm Dallas time (10.30am home time) after a brief stop to see The Mustangs of Los Colinas statues. After arriving at our hotel (Crown Plaza Dallas Downtown) we wandered only a short 10 minutes up the road to Pioneer Plaza to see the Longhorn statues there. Pretty awesome to see such huge bronze statues. Pretty sure my photos don't do them justice.

Tomorrow it's over to Fort Worth to get our cowboy on.