The Big Easy (exit)

For someone who had a career putting lipstick on a pig you’d expect they’d be a little bit more wary of internet portrayals of a business especially if their website slideshow is overlaid with calming ambient music.
But being sucked in we booked this hotel near the airport at Brisbane to get an easy start for our flight to San Francisco via Sydney.

Now I’m not a complete idiot, I checked on Google maps to check the place was off any main highways so we wouldn’t be driven crazy with traffic noise.
This proved successful because as we approached the hotel we saw parks all around and it was situated on a nice quiet street.
Maybe a little too quiet, well thats what the local hoons thought because for them it made the perfect drag strip and that’s what we copped till they got bored at about three in the morning but then it turned out those surrounding parks were actually race tracks for horses like Ascot and so on.

Now I don’t know what problem these horse people have with this getting up early business but that’s what they do just in time to take over from those dragster fools, so along they came with their damn banging, clanging horse float things, hundreds of them driving down our quiet street.

Enough of this we decided to leave early for the airport so we would have plenty of time.
Why bother Sydney Airport was hit with a massive storm so air traffic control delayed any aircraft on the east coast who hadn’t already taken off from doing so, so they could clear the backlog.
Two hour delay at Brisbane, we only had an hour between the connecting flight to San Francisco.
Now as I said, I’m not a complete idiot but with maths I am but even I could do the easy sums on this one and it wasn’t going to work. By this stage our original excitement had deflated a little.

Good news at Sydney, the storm had delayed all flights so ours hadn’t left, we were fine.
Bad news at Sydney the storm wasn’t the reason ours was delayed, something was wrong with a valve.
Four hours later it was repaired but it had to be tested, an hour later we boarded but sat there for another hour because they had forgotten to refuel and the fact that we had been delayed for so long they had to get more meals.
We sank lower in our seats thinking this is like the plane that never left, it was delayed by getting more meals, then getting more meals delayed it further so they had to get more meals then that delayed......enough this was what was going round in our heads and our original excitement was not only deflated but was like a plastic soccer ball that some old dog was chewing up down the backyard.

We were down the back and I swear I heard the plane hit something as it was backing out but I was saying nothing, I didn’t care if half the tail section was missing we just wanted to get in the air.

In the end the flight was great especially for a plane with no tail section and for once in my life I had a nice American border guard at customs which has led us to today where we have been touring “the streets of San Francisco.” and it has been really good.Read more