Saturday Musings - The Journey Home

[ParkLogic]

When you’re traveling for hours on an airplane across the Pacific and the hoped for upgrade to business class didn’t come through you have a lot of time to think. Since sleeping is more a cycle of twisting into a pretzel, waking up in agony and then repeating the process I decided to massage my intellect with a couple of movies. This was a big mistake...

Given the lack of selection I indulged in the terrible “Lego Movie” and then discovered it was much better than the “Robcop” remake. Those two movies killed about 3 hours of my life that I will never get back but worse than that the picture of the plane on the map had barely managed to crawl its way across the Pacific. Hmmm……not good!

I pulled my laptop out of my case from the upper locker and quickly discovered that due to a lack of space I could only open it about two thirds of the way. Being an inventive fellow I ended up propping the keyboard against my body and lying the screen on the pull out table. Needless to say, typing became a case of drumming on the keys followed by a lot of back spaces. In the end, I’d managed to complete out a couple of chapters of my new science fiction book before my arms and fingers gave up their tortured positions.

So what was next? Meals! I believe that’s what you call them on a plane. It’s the stuff that they serve you that’s been heated to about 2000 degrees, left for an ages and appears more like a mush then anything resembling food. When I looked at my meal it looked more like a Youtube episode of “Will it blend?” without the blending. Everything just collapsed under the awesome weight of my fork.

Here’s a lesson for everyone that’s ever flown before. Never and I mean never, drink from anything other than a sealed bottle. This includes tea and coffee. The water tanks in aircraft are often filled with weird biological creatures that play havoc with your internal digestive system when you get home. So buy an extra bottle of water before boarding the aircraft as the cabin crew will run out of bottles and offer to provide their “tap” water poison.

Landing in Melbourne is always a treat. As per normal the several planes full of Chinese had landed just ahead of us and immigration was bedlam. That’s fine, I have an APEC card which allowed me to go in the crew line and bypass the chaos….thank you for small mercies! I just wish that the staff on the outbound side of LAX realised that the US government had agreed to the use of the APEC card as well. Writing this has reminded me to send an email to the TSA on the subject - all done now.

So after about 24 hours of waiting in airports and flying back from Las Vegas both Roselyn and I are finally home. The good news is that our two girls haven’t burnt the house down and it was relatively clean when we stepped through the front door. This made me instantly suspicious and wonder if "Risky Business" types of events were being held in our home while we were away…..just joking!

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