While planning an upcoming trip to Australia and New Zealand, I was reminded of my first visit Down Under in 1989 to cover the Australian Open tennis tournament for the Associated Press.

The flight to Australia was the trip from hell, courtesy of the AP’s incompetent travel agent. Her reservations were often so disastrous that we joked she must have booked Amelia Earhart’s last flight. Instead of sending me on the usual route – New York to Los Angeles or San Francisco, a connecting flight to Sydney and then a short hop to Melbourne– she somehow arranged this Rube Goldbergish itinerary: New York to Cleveland, Cleveland to Houston, Houston to San Francisco, San Francisco to Honolulu, Honolulu to Sydney, and Sydney to Melbourne.

Factoring in layovers and the time difference, I arrived in Melbourne three days after I left New York. After checking into my hotel, I immediately called the travel agent to demand an explanation. (For some reason I can’t recall, I wasn’t aware of my tortuous flight schedule before I left home.) She apologized but never gave me a lucid reason, either for the roundabout route or the fact that I was booked in coach for the entire trip instead of business class, which was required for international trips under our union contract. However, since it happened during one of the AP’s frequent budget crackdowns, I suspected it was all about getting the cheapest tickets possible.

I was exhausted by the time I finally got to Melbourne, but because of the 16-hour time difference with New York I found myself facing a looming deadline. I had written several stories on the tournament before I left, but now I needed to do a quick one based on interviews with players already on the scene. Unfortunately, because of my late arrival, I had missed all the pre-tournament press conferences with the top players. So I rushed out to the new National Tennis Centre at Flinders Park – it was only a year old then and has since been renamed Melbourne Park – in a desperate attempt to find a star to interview. I roamed around for several hours with no success and was just about to give up when I saw John McEnroe walking toward the men’s locker room.

McEnroe was about to turn 30 and past his prime, but he was still a huge name in tennis. I had only been covering the sport for a few years and didn’t know him well, but I stopped him at the locker-room door and asked if he could spare a few minutes to talk. Despite his rowdy on-court behavior and frequent feuds with the tabloid press, I had always found him to be cooperative and thoughtful. But even I was surprised when our encounter turned into a freewheeling 45-minute chat in which McEnroe candidly expressed his views on the new tennis center, rival Ivan Lendl, fatherhood and a variety of other topics. Following the interview, I took a taxi back to my hotel, wrote my story and then fell asleep for 12 hours. (Footnote: McEnroe lost to Lendl in the quarterfinals. The following year, he was thrown out of the tournament for cursing at officials during his fourth-round match with Mikael Pernfors.)

After the two-week tournament ended, I took a vacation and traveled to Sydney and Cairns with my friend and fellow journalist Peter Bodo. The trip almost ended at Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach, where Peter’s quick thinking saved me from drowning. It was a cold day in early February, with huge waves swirling offshore, and I was the only person dumb enough to go swimming. As Peter sat on the beach reading a book, the strong undercurrent quickly carried me away from the shore. Before I knew it, I was so far out that I could barely see the sand. I started to swim back, but the waves were so high that I began swallowing water. Soon, my legs were cramping and I could barely move. Realizing I couldn’t make it back on my own, I began screaming for help. Though he couldn’t even see me, Peter heard my cries and ran down the beach to the closest lifeguard, who rowed out in a small boat and rescued me just minutes before I would have gone Down Under for good.

After I recovered, we walked back to our seedy motel (at the time, the area was a hangout for drug dealers, hookers and other unsavory types) and discovered that someone had broken into our room and stolen our laptops. That wasn’t an immediate problem for me since I was done working and didn’t have any more stories to write. But Peter wrote for a tennis magazine and his story on the tournament, which he had yet to file, was stored on his computer. So he spent the next few days reconstructing his story from scratch, which severely cut into our bar-hopping time.

We then flew up to Cairns, an outdoors paradise in the northeast corner of the country where we scuba-dived in the Great Barrier Reef, rode a jeep through a lush rainforest and drank copious amounts of Australian beer. My memories of that part of the trip are a bit hazy, though I do remember getting one of the worst sunburns of my life.

I returned to Australia several times after that, but I haven’t been back for 25 years. I’m hoping my next trip won’t include any near drownings, stolen computers, severe sunburns or three-day flights.