Day 18:
I'll split this into 2 parts covering the Canada-US then transpacific portion of travel.
A final bluebird morning summed up the trip well. Mostly cold and clear conditions but beautiful sunshine.
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We checked out from the hotel and saw a live painter in the lobby which was cool.
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Check in was pretty painless. Priority lane utilised and regular bags tagged and sent to be next seen in Sydney. The oversize here is similar to Sydney, in that you must take it to the drop off yourself, with an additional step of x-raying the bags. This took a bit of time as it seemed like there was 100s of kids heading to Hockey tournaments all over the States needing to do the same with their gear bags.
After sending the snowboard bag off to Sydney we had priority security passes thanks to our Fairmont Gold room which certainly saved us considerable time. Following this we pre-cleared US CBP which was a long but ultimately painless process.
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Once airside we did some souvenir shopping and ate Burritos from a small, very popular, mexican place for lunch. No lounge access here for Oneworlds on US bound flights unfortunately.
We boarded on time, albeit the last in business as the gate was the furthest from where we were waiting, and climbed through some building cloud to our cruising altitude. We were in First/Business so got served some cold platters which were actually half decent tasting. My fiance had a pasta salad and I had a roast beef sandwich.
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The flight was fairly bumpy, especially so on descent into a very gloomy, wet and windy LAX where we got absolutely tossed around in the little Embraer. Ultimately we landed without incident and taxied to AAs regional terminal which was a little confusing as I thought we would be at T4. From here there was some confusion as 2 lines looked to need forming, one for connections and one for arrivals, though ultimately we all boarded the same bus bound for T4.
After disembarking the bus in what can only be described as the middle of nowhere we walked about 100mtrs through the pouring rain to enter T4.
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After arriving into T4 we navigated the sterile, haunted like labyrinth that is the T4-TBIT connector though ultimately we were just happy to already be airside and once we made it to TBIT we headed straight to the QF first lounge.
