April 17, Thursday: I’m writing this at 5am on Easter Sunday, April 20 (which I believe is at noon in PDX on Saturday). Doing it on my iPhone, because my iPad is in the hands of Fedex, on its way to the Mayfair hotel in Adelaide (thanks to our sterling neighbor, Evan Martin), where I hope to reconnect with and apologize to it for leaving it behind after so diligently remembering all 200-300 of the other trip prep things necessary for this odyssey.
Despite the length of that sentence, this will be a shortened post, using snippets because of my bad and worsening thumb typing skills. So….
- the bulk of time in our last ditch prep was spent on exhausting alternatives for getting Dana’s migraine medicine shot to the Cairns area for her early May injection -it needs refrigeration. Solution: a small thermos with a cooling gel tube that we carry with us and rerefrigerate every night. Daunting challenge to our aging memories. OK, have to shorten these.
- 4:10 pickup by our airport transfer angel Janet Harbert – 10 minutes early, thankfully, since we hit a 1 & 1/2 hour delay on I205, arriving after 5:30 – likely Easter weekend crunch
- slick checkin at PDX despite the need to do a counter check due to the Aus ETA (google it); cool United Guatemalan kid expedited it in a kiosk, the thermos passed TSA-pre without even an eyebrow raised
- at the gate, I noticed the iPad missing, texted Evan who sprang into action – too late to get it to PDX because of the traffic snarl
- flight delayed, due to prior flight crew having also been delayed by the snarl,
- huge pre-boarding by Easter weekend commuting K1 frequent flyers from the Silicon Forest to their homes in Silicon valley.
- very pleasant, calming, restorative 15 minutes in the Polaris Lounge in SFO
- opulent multi-course bus class dinner at about 9 pm
- relearned how to use the power buttons to convert our pods into sleepers
- I accepted the FA offer of pjs (seriously) but couldn’t bring myself to use them
- quickly crashed
April 18, Friday: lost at the International Date Line. Don’t ask for an explanation – I don’t understand it.
Dana and Roger Travels 