Plane flight

The starting of this blog has been delayed by me not having access to a working keyboard; sorry!

The night before I left I went out to have a meal with my father at the Wollongong Golf Club. The meal was fairly average, but it was a club, and towards the end they came around offering us trivia sheets. Trivia! I convinced my father to play. We were only going to stay for the first round. In the first round we bombed out, embarassingly, due to a three point question on basketball teams - and also my father's hilariously obscure answers to the question of "name six countries outside the British Isles that end in -land." He generated obscurities from the past 5000 years, and, I suspect, Marx brothers movies. Anyway, this raised his and my competitive instincts, and in the second round our small team of two blitzed the field and we won a free bottle of wine. We didn't do so well after that, but it was a good night, and my father really enjoyed himself - I'm not sure I've ever seen him enjoy going out so much.

And I had a good time, too. Which was a good thing, as I've been generally not so great this year. Feeling bad about myself for a variety of reasons. And I was nervous about going away. The next morning - after my father and brother had seen me off at the airport, and I'd negotiated the exit lounge, purchasing along the way a bottle of duty free vodka (which will become important later), and got myself succesfully onto the plane, I felt good. Good to be leaving, excited about having some sort of change/break in my life. Overseas trips providing a useful sort of life division, I find; an ending of a chapter, if not a whole Part.

So I was undelighted to discover the proverbial, legendary overweight woman in the seat next to me. Well, she was large, and I reminded myself that I should not consider her "fat", for she might be a charming aeroplane neighbour. I asked her to slip by, and she grunted at me in an unfriendly fashion. This exchange proved the highlight of our plane relationship - man, she was a surly cow! She immediately took possesion of the arm rests, and a few inches beyond into my space. I tried to stake a small claim on the armrest - let her know I wasn't intimidated - but she proved to have no body consciousness whatsoever. Normally, a stranger will shy from casual physical contact, but not her. By the end of the flight I had retreated to the far half of my seat. Meals proved particularly difficult as her gargantuan chicken-wings flapped out a good foot to each side, leaving me with no room whatsoever to wield my terrorist-proof cutlery.

So, sitting there, I felt good, excited, relaxed. Then the pilot came on, and I'm not a nervous flyer, but he unnerved me. He mentioned we would be leaving shortly, that there was a small delay from traffic control - all normal. And then he started - there is no other word for it - bitching. "We'll be swinging out onto the north runway, then taxi-ing back south, we make a left turn, then a right turn - if you can believe THAT - and then, if it's OK with air traffic control, we might be able to take off." Whoah! Had he not slept well? Was he about to go postal? I sensed we would be in trouble if it came to an emergency landing on the Hudson.

Not much more to report on the flight - except for Fat American Woman's elaborate sighing whenever I had to get up to use the bathroom. We landed at LAX, I had difficulty finding where I was supposed to connect with my next flight. I was carrying with me a duty-free bag, containing vodka and cigarettes. Anyway I now had to negotiate the US homeland security's screening system. They only had one working metal detecting pinging machine, and the queue was a mile long. Everybody had to remove their shoes to ensure there were no shoe-bombers. The pinging machine was manned by a single asshole beaurocrat. Now normally, at those machines, you go through - you ping - and somebody waves a wand over you, and waves you on through. This guy had his own system. If you pinged, you were sent back through and told to figure out what was pinging, and removed it. Of course, everybody pings, so the queue wasn't moving. I removed all my metal and went through, and pinged. I was sent back. I said, "I have no metal other than my clothing!" This cut no dice. I searched my pockets, and found a single Australian 5c piece. I removed it and dumped it on a post. I went back through, no pinging this time. But more problems - they were concerned that my duty-free bottle of vodka might be used to create a bomb. I denied posessing the neccessary chemical skills for this. I said that I didn't believe anybody had those skills. I pointed out - to the girl, who was actually quite lovely - that if such skills did exist, and if I had them, I probably would have used them on the twelve hour flight from Australia. She escorted me back to the check-in section and told me I'd need to have my vodka stowed in the hold. (To her credit, she told me to come back to the front of the line when I returned). So the Qantas people and I discussed what to do with it. We wrapped it in a hessian bag with loads of tape and fragile tags, and together gave it one chance in three of making it. Personally I thought it a dumber idea to have a loose bottle of high-proof alcohol in a glass container rolling about in the hold, but I was given no vote.

Back to the pinging machines, and the asshole beurocrat. I was now late. I was pinging again! He returned me to the other side. "We just did this!" I said. "I have acquired no new metal." "If the machine pings, it pings," he said, profoundly and with a couldn't-give-a-shit shrug. He told me to remove my belt. I did so, and this time didn't ping. "Now you know," he said - smugly and menacingly. "Your machine is making it up as it goes along," I muttered. I collected my belt, and my shoes - again - and made it to my flight.

I got off at JFK, my bag was late off, and I started to worry. Then, after everyone else had left, my bag appeared - followed, a few seconds later, by bottle of vodka, remarkably intact. I left the terminal, and Bree was there, waiting for me, peering about blindly. I felt a great wave of affection and relief; it was really nice.

More soon about my time in New York, hopefully. Apologies for bad overlong sentences and excessive adverbs; this is all single draft and not edited this at all.