Pat’s Point of View

Austin – Denver

Quick poll: who wouldn’t mind flying from Texas to Colorado, a travel time of about 1 hour 40 minutes? OK, what about if the airplane contains the pungent stench of faeces? Yup, someone done shat their duds on that particular Airbus! I don’t know if it was the little kid sitting next to me, or one of the many other toddlers, or the cute lil infant a few rows up. Let me rephrase that, I hope it was one of them, because the alternative means one of the adults was sitting in shite for the best part of two hours. I tell ya I couldn’t wait to get off that plane.

Denver – San Francisco

This time United gave me a good while to get to my connecting flight, over an hour! So I got to have a bite to eat; my stomach thought it was about 9:00pm and so I hadn’t eaten for quite a spell (can you tell I’ve been in Texas?). In the airport I got to experience the worst McDonald’s service ever. Sadly I’ve eaten at Ronald’s place all over the world and this was the worst. The slackers working in this joint made growing grass look speedy. Absolutely no concern for customer service whatsoever. Anyway, at least I got to charge my laptop.

So this flight wasn’t too bad, even though I was in the absolute last row of seats which made it feel like a rollercoaster. This was the only flight on this whole trip that had back-of-seat video units, and I didn’t have any headphones! But it didn’t worry me since I was happy to catch up on email (reading). So far I’ve managed to rip through a huge backlog of mailing list messages from the last few months…I’m going to make an effort to read them as they come in from now on. Might need to buy Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy.

Finally got to SFO and got mauled by security transferring from domestic to international. May have something to do with the Homeland Security threat level being at orange or it could be that I was looking seedy. My backpack got x-ray’d so much I think it’s going to glow. I even got the fart machine (you step into a booth and lots of wind hits you from all directions). I didn’t mind since I had over an hour to waste.

San Francisco – Sydney

I was hoping that my big flight would be as spacious as my last one, that is nobody sitting right next to me. I was so wrong. Firstly my seat assignment went out the window (no, not literally) and I ended up sitting in the middle of the row up against a partition. This meant no elbow room on either side and no leg room. It was awful, so I spent quite a bit of time standing up at the back of the plane reading a book.

The flight seemed to go forever but eventually we touched down in Sydney at 6:15am. Almost 25 hours of travelling, because of the longer breaks between connecting flights. So you imagine I was well up for a slow trudge though immigration, baggage claim, customs and then quarantine. Finally I exited into the eager arms of my darling wife. I was very proud of her, she almost didn’t cry :)

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