David and James' Excellent Adventure

The day finally came.

David and James were on their way to New York! Thanks to Margaret for dropping us at the airport, we were so keen we were the very first people at the front of the queue to checkin for Virgin Australia flight 1 to LA. We ended up with 3 seats between us and there were lots of movies to watch. In all the flight was excellent.

Landing in LA was exciting. We could see some spaghetti-like freeways and big channels like in the car-race scene from Grease or where Arnie rode the motorbike in one of the Terminator movies. It was very flat and a bit hazy.

We had to change planes in LA so we made our way off the plane to join the first queue, this was the queue to join the queue to then join the queue to get through Border Protection (not joking!). Some of the people carrying guns looked very scary. The same ticket mix-up Tracey had meant David and I sat for 2 hours watching the cars drive past LA Airport and trying to work out what model/make they were. This meant we had a sprint to the plane, shove through security checks (full body scan not just the metal detectors!), and run to the gate. We weren't sitting together and the flight was chokkers. It was also a white knuckle flight being very bumpy going over some of the mountains.

After 5 hours we finally landed in New York!

It looked fantastic from the air, lots of lights. We found the baggage claim, dodged some of the people offering us a lift, and hiked out to the Yellow Cab rank. The they have a fixed fare system which is good and bad - good in that it meant we weren't going to be ripped off, bad in that it meant the cabbie aimed for warp-factor 5 on the trip in. I thought he was talking to us in Klingon but he was actually asking what cross street we wanted, I remembered Linda saying something about Grand Street and that seemed to sound right to him. He dropped us on the corner and we found the unit with no problems.

It was great to see Tracey and Ewan again. The unit is fanastic, very comfortable and very warm though the weather was cool but not that cold.

We crashed!Read more