Saturday, 10 May – we skipped 9 May because of the International Date Line.
Thanks, Peter Allen. A few people asked me before I went away was this going to be a prelude to moving back to the USA, again. Answer: No Bloody Way. I am glad to be home.
Any way, the plane flight finally ended and we landed virtually on time. It looks like 3 or 4 other planes have landed at the same time given the number of people buzzing around in the airport. In spite of that we do reasonably well getting through it all. HOT TIP: if you are arriving at MEL, at least, use one of the facial recognition terminals to get an exit card, this will save waiting in lengthy queues at immigration. We go through and wait for our luggage at the carousel. Again, given the traffic around, we do pretty well. At the Customs exit, the girl says that I look like Doc from Back to the Future, she must be at least #150 to say that. She waves us straight through. Gary is not far away for picking us up so we head outside and get a major shock. It is raining – cold, wet and miserable. We are ready to jump back on the plane and go back. Gary comes by shortly, we load the bags in the car and are off home. I reckon we got there before 9:30 (plane landed at 8:30).
And so the trip ends! It was a memorable 5 1/2 weeks in the USA. There were some absolutely stunning aspects of it:
* The NYC tour, thanks Colin and Doug. Great restaurants (Per Se comes to mind) and lots of interesting activities.
* Our (mostly) great experiences with the AirBnB homes and Hosts were stunning.
* Good times in and around DC and New Orleans plus the Bay Area experiences with the family.
* The Taco Truck moments
* For Julie the smoked salmon at Russ and Daughters and for me the Pastrami at Katz’s deli only a few shops away.
There weren’t many negatives:
* I got challenged when first landing at LAX by a snotty nosed immigration fellow – What are you doing here, this after entering on my USA passport.
* The number of people in our group that got sick in NYC.
* Many of the areas we visited were swamped with tourists, even though we were in a relatively off peak time.
* In general, although we went to some nice restaurants and had some nice food, I found the USA food experience was not all that unique.
* I missed out on In n Out (my fault), Fried Chicken and had hash browns only once. And most of the Crab was a bit insipid (whinge, whinge, whinge)
So that’s it, folks. Another tour has ended and this Blog will be suspended for a while, possibly until June next year when we are on another tour in France with Colin and Doug. Be sure to keep an eye out for the 2014 page on this website as it covers special functions that we go to in Melbourne.
Cheers for now.