Home

Hi all,
International air travel sucks.
There, I said it.
By the time we got to bed last night, we’d been up for about 40 hours… if you ignore the 4 hours of “sleep” we got on the plane. I put sleep in inverted commas, because it was FAR from restful. It may have rested my eyes, but that was about the extent of it’s usefulness.
On top of that, the in-flight entertainment system for the 3 seats that we had together just happened to be semi-functional (which is a generous description). Sometimes, you’d load a movie and it would start playing, but it would be all pixelated and crappy, but then 15 mins into it, it would just reset itself, and then when you tried to restart it, you’d get a screen which would say “we are unable to deliver your requested movie at this time”.
Oh joy.
So, we got to Aukland at 6:30 yesterday morning, and had a 3 hours stop over. Can you believe in this day and age that there are international departure lounges which do not have playgrounds to entertain kids? Who designs these freakin’ airports? 50 year old spinsters? Jesus H.
And so then we jump on our Aukland-Sydney flight which wasn’t too bad, although by that stage, I think most of my senseswere shutting down anyway.
Jaded as I may be with Qantas (who WILL be receiving a letter from me this week… believe me, there were more issues than just the ones I’ve mentioned), we had an awesome time in the States, absolutely fell in love with San Francisco (and have vowed to return there for a holiday at some point in the future), met some really lovely people (and missed meeting some too… my apologies, Michael L!)… yeah, all in all, I’d have to say that it was the best holiday I’ve ever had…. at least in the sense of getting to see lots of different stuff. Probably not so in terms of “restful” holidays, because it most certainly was not that! But, that is my fault and mine alone. We always knew it was going to be that way. As I said to folks we met along the way, “When you travel half a planet away, you have to make the most of your time and cram as much in as possible”. And that’s what we did.
So, there you have it.
Two weeks of madness crammed into a thousand words of blog entries.
Thanks for those who’ve followed along and left comments.
Thanks also to all the folks who wrote to me with suggestions for things to see and do at the various stages along our route. Some we were able to take up, and some we just had to pass by. I think if we had done all the things that people wrote and suggested, we’d have an extra 2 week holiday!
And now, it’s time to get back to work.
Podcast listeners rejoice… 3 new eps coming your way this weekened!
Cheers,
Bruce.