Well, as you can probably guess, I’m back. Good trip, but very glad to be home.
First and foremost, HBs to Lara, who is officially “old” today. :tongue: We had a good night at the Willow on Sunday to celebrate. But let me do this chronologically.
Thursday we did very little in Utah, besides watch TV and do washing. Oh, we had Apollo Burger for our one meal that day. Delicious - I had an Apollo Burger and a Chilli Dog, Godfrey (mistakenly) ordered 2 Apollo Burgers. I think he may have exploded.
We also went shopping for some drive-time groceries - including a huge (about 1 litre I’m guessing) energy drink to pep up our spirits and a 12-pack of Krispy Kremes to provide a sugar rush. I bought enough pink lemonade powder to make 8 gallons of delicious pink lemonade. That should last about 8 weeks. :poke:
Friday morning, we were up at 5am, Utah time. Godfrey is the egg-poaching master, so he poached up a storm and we headed off. There was a freaking BLIZZARD in southern Utah that day, and we spent the morning driving through moderate snow. The visibility was amazingly poor, and in some ways it’s a miracle we survived. Of course, you can only voice that kind of opinion after the fact. It was pretty scary though.
We drove for 12 hours, stopping briefly in Las Vegas to use McDonald’s restroom and eat a $1 double cheeseburger each. Reaching the airport was a major relief in terms of management - our previous experience with Los Angeles traffic indicated that the trip could take between 10 hours and one billion. Fortunately 12 hours was within the window of acceptable outcomes.
The QANTAS lounge at the Tom Bradley International Terminal is actually a JAL lounge, and quite poor. The one at Terminl 4 is better, but that only goes to Sydney I think. We ate a few packets of chips, drank a fair slew of free drinks and read the newspapers for 6 hours. Boring does not even begin to describe it.
The flight was long. You forget how long 14 hours can be … it takes a long, long time, when those 14 hours are uncomfortable and noisy. I managed to sleep about 6 hours, which was an improvement from the flight over. That still left 6 hours of almost unsufferable boredom. Snod sat next to the biggest jerkwad in the history of the world, but we had an empty seat between us, so it wasn’t all bad.
Got in, cleared customs relatively painlessly. Mum “made” breakfast (which means she went to McDonalds) and then I had a nap. I set the alarm for only a two hour sleep, because I wanted to sleep as normally as possible that night.
Man it feels good to drive my car again. Bench seats are the devil. So uncomfrotable compared to bucket-stlye seats. I picked up Godfrey at about 4 and we headed to Moorooka central for Lara’s party. It was fun.
Yesterday I worked with Leyton on the business pretty much all day, with breaks for pizza and swimsuit model search on television. You’ve gotta have your priorities straight.