What kind of contact are they thinking about?

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Originally uploaded by Supraats.

Reclaimed Water Used In This Device
Avoid Contact

It can't be drinking. I mean, dogs can't read anyway.

Day 4 - Scottsdale to The Grand Canyon

Fantastic Day. Lots to blog about. Unfortunately, we are currently on pay-per-minute dialup instead of flat-fee Wireless or LAN.

I suppose that the Grand Canyon National Park doesn't get many business travellers.

This post and the previous one will be updated. Keep watching the skis.

Day 3 - San Diego, CA to Scottsdale, AZ

Lots of driving today; according to our tour guide this was one of the longest days in terms of hours spent driving on the tour.

Lots of other people driving today; this was the last day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, so everyone was heading home from the holidays, to pervert a common American phrase.

Lots of people not driving on the I-10, outside of Phoenix, AZ thanks to a collision between a pickup and a semi-trailer. Since our coach driver lives in Phoenix, and knows how to get to Scottsdale on the outskirts without using the Interstate, we were not included among those people.

More to come on this day sometime soon...

San Diego Old Town

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Originally uploaded by Supraats.

Here is our tour bus parked outside a Catholic Church in the San Diego Old Town. Click on it to see more pictures, if you dare...

Day 2 - San Diego.

Today the tour headed south to San Diego. We saw the Old Town with the tour and the USS Midway on our own initiative.

We have pictures. Really, we do. Someday soon I should work out the kinks of putting them all on the web. Watch this space.

Day 1, Part 3 - Jetlagged in LA

It's noon, but your body thinks it's the end of a long long day. (and it is, but avoiding jet-lag requires denying that reality.) You stagger down the hotel corridor from the elevator dragging your luggage behind you, swipe your card in the door and collapse on the bed.

No you don't. Sleep is bad. Sleeping now will make it harder to sleep tonight, which will only prolong the jetlag you're feeling. So get up, both of you, and take showers. Kerry first. Which leaves you to answer the phone. It's the tour director for the tour you are joining tomorrow, asking if you could come and see her in the lobby to go over the tour details.

Salvation! Aside from all of the tour information, baggage tags etc. she provides information on the shuttle bus service to nearby Manhattan Beach. (nearby in the Southern California sense of "ten minutes away by freeway", of course.)

So off you go to fill up your afternoon at the local shopping centre in Manhattan Beach, CA ("mall" in Californian). Here you see many upmarket stores getting into the Christmas spirit, as today is the day after Thanksgiving and thus the official start of the Christmas shopping season.

ASIDE: I tell you what I think Americans should be thankful for: Thanksgiving itself, throwing itself on the holiday season like a soldier on a grenade; thus preventing the invasion of Rudolph, Santa and his elves from hitting the department stores before their time.

In America there is the soothing progression of Pumpkins and Witches giving way to Pilgrims and Turkeys which become in the fullness of time the symbols of the season of the birth of Our Lord. (Oh, and those of Hanukkah, and Kwaanza, and the Winter Solstice, and the few more festivals that I'm sure have been added to the season in the four years since I was last in the States at this time of year.) In Australia it's all Christmas from oh, about March.

Anyway, you and Kerry look in the upmarket stores, and pick up a few necessities at the mall drugstore, but what really catches your eye are the restaurants. Lovely, lovely places, serving meals not specifically designed to fit into a four inch slot on an airline food trolley. Food is enjoyed at a restaurant called "Islander" which appears to be part of a chain, and which you suspect may have served as part of the inspiration for the fictional "Big Kahuna Burger" from Pulp Fiction.

And so, your hunger sated and the sky darkening, you board the shuttle bus back to the hotel district. It's been a good day and you're happy; so happy that you don't seem to mind when the bus driver confuses your hotel with another and drops you two blocks away.

After walking back to the hotel, you sleep the sleep of the happy and content (after packing the bag of the guy who took too much stuff along) looking forward to the coach tour starting tomorrow. First stop: San Diego.

Day 1, Part 2 - Deplane! Deplane!

Well, despite the header of this post there was no Ricardo Montalban welcoming us to Fantasy Island; just an officious little man from the TSA who loved his job way too much telling us to have our I-94 and Customs forms filled out correctly because if we went to the Immigration officers and there was a problem, we would not be allowed to fill them out there - we would be sent back to the end of the line.

Also, we needed to form a queue here not there, because there was another flight coming in soon for processing and they would need the room here to queue up.

Once the sheepdog trial was over and we were all lined up correctly, it was just a matter of waiting; and of trying to decipher the arcane I-94 and US customs forms, of course. I thought I had it right, but wondered if I should have taken the flight crew up on their offer, made just before landing, to distribute I-94s printed in German. (The claimed reason was a shortage of the English version, but I suspect that they simply understood that sometimes familiarity with a language is not helpful when attempting to understand documents written by governments.)

In the end, no problems with Immigration or Customs; ( not even after answering "How can you afford a 45-day holiday in the US" with "I was on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". ) Although it seemed for a moment that my right index finger didn't want to be fingerprinted, the offending digit succumbed eventually, and I was free... to collect our bags and proceed through Customs, which was uneventful for me - although Kerry managed to score herself a random interview with a Customs officer.

Fortunately, being a law-abiding supraat, Kerry soon joined me on the kerb outside the LAX arrivals terminal. Lots of taxis, vans, shuttles and buses, zooming by very very fast, swerving quickly into bays and zipping out of them. Welcome to the USA.

(Oh, and in relation the predictions made by the TSA man at the top of the post: no other flight arrived in the half hour we waited for processing, and the Immigration Officers I saw seemed happy to let visitors make minor corrections to their paperwork.)

Day 1, Part 1 - MEL-SYD-LAX

The late Douglas Adams once wrote that no language has ever come up with the simile "as pretty as an airport". Had he been encouraged to continue on the theme of air travel, he could very easily have pointed out that "as pleasant as a long-haul flight" is also conspicuous by its absence.

Having said that, this one wasn't too bad. There were a few hairy moments though - the first being when we were informed by the flight crew that the airline's Sydney to San Francisco service had been cancelled, and the passengers from the flight would be joining ours to Los Angeles.

Thanks to the products of our information age, airlines are able to do wonderful things like determine whether two half-empty long-haul flights can easily be replaced at the last minute with a single long-haul flight and a short hop to San Francisco at the other end. Personally, I feel priveleged and awed to live in such an age; and only a little bit of that wears off when my half-empty plane with lots of room to stretch out magically fills up.

Besides, we were in the queue for the check in counter at Melbourne before it opened, and had thus managed to wheedle Exit Row seats all the way to Los Angeles. So our legroom and space needs were well attended to.

The second scare came when our flight was called in the transit area in Sydney, and a group of young men in matching football team polo shirts started drifting towards our gate. I had been assuming that they had been off to Bali for their end of season trip, but I guess they must have won a Grand Final or something because they were off to the USA. The prospect of 13 hours in a confined space with an Australian football team loomed, and grew even loomier when a large quantity of them settled into the cabin in the rows just ahead of our seats.

But our worries were in vain, as they seemed to behave themselves. Which is not to say that there were no attempts on Boonie's record as the flight wore on; but if there were, they were mounted with quiet professionalism.

So after an uneventful flight, with the biggest annoyance (to me) being Kerry discussing the iterations of A(ustrali|meric)an Idol and the pros and cons of the various winners with the flight attendant seated in the jump seat as we came in to land in LAX. This annoyed me because quite frankly the show is a waste of time that I wouldn't be caught dead watching; and also because it was obvious that the Italian kid should have won...

And about the time I thought that, the wheels hit the ground, the engines went into full reverse, Chewie locked in the auxiliary power, and we were officially on the soil of the United States of America.