Next morning we woke early, enjoyed the magnificent brekky buffet at the Hilton – the little shot glasses of bircher muesli rocked – and set out for the airport three hours before checkin as required. Now we thought this would give us ample time to just wander about and do some duty free window shopping. Don’t be fooled – the new security measures for US flights are quite incredible. Let’s face it – it’s not as if Australian authorities just let you wander onto a plane. You have to show your passport when you check in. You have to fill out an immigration form to leave the country (even if you’re a citizen), then a Customs official checks that and your boarding pass. After that you have to have your bag screened through an x-ray machine. At the screening point, all liquids and laptops are checked separately and you then walk through a metal detector, without your belt and more often than not barefoot. That’s not all if you’re going to the states. Now all the gates for US travel are enclosed. You have to have your passport and boarding pass rechecked and the bag that just went through an x-ray machine is hand searched, you have to take off your shoes so they can also search them and every passenger is frisked. Once you are in, you’re stuck because if you leave, you have to go through the whole procedure again.

Points to Delta for the flight – we left on time and actually arrived early. The food was pretty good – a mix of Australian and American treats – New York cheesecake as well as Tim Tams. The drinks cart with water came around often and in big American sized glasses – not super-sized but larger than the really small cups Qantas uses. We both had the beef casserole with potatoes and vege, which was surprisingly good – as were the blueberry pancakes for brick. The entertainment system also rocked. We had initially intended to watch True blood on the flight but decided not to bother with the Delta on Demand stuff – basically anything on HBO – as there was a hefty catalogue of free stuff from vintage Murphy Brown to a plethora of movies. I finally watched the hangover and Inglorious Basterds and revisited the recent Star Trek movie – the one where you can’t quite recognise the villain is Eric Bana. (Longview – Green Day – this marked the return of punk to mainstream culture and rends me of furniture building. I listened to this and NOFX while sanding back my – still unfinished- bedside table – also kind of appropriate for describing the next part of the trip – as Green Day are from the east bay area of California).

There’s no denying it – 14 hours on a plane is excruciating. The advantage of flying to Europe, although longer, is that you get to stop half way. We were looking forward to spending a while walking around the airport before our connection. We arrived in LAX at dawn with the lights of LA sprawling out into the desert out the plane window. We had almost two and a half hours before our flight to NYC and it took every minute to get through the airport. First up we had to collect our luggage and clear Customs – two forms to fill out (which we did on the plane), then a passport check – which didn’t involve them looking at or x-raying the luggage we just collected. Then we dumped the luggage and headed toward the security check point, which they’ve apparently added an extra step to. We had to queue for what felt like about an hour to have our passport and boarding pass checked before we walked upstairs to have them checked again and have our carry-on bags x-rayed. Strangely I have never seen anyone do an explosives test anywhere and have only ever been selected myself at Canberra airport. None in the US either. The five-hour trip to NYC was a killer. TC and I had to sit behind each other in middle seats. Apparently the storms in the north-east were so bad on Sunday that all the flights were cancelled. Our flight was overbooked so we are probably lucky to have arrived at all. I sat next to a lady from LA who berated me slightly for not spending time in her own terrific city. She said she had a cousin in Australia who had retired and was travelling around Australia – she thought this a strange thing to do. I told her they were called grey nomads and that he was in good company. (The Ship Song – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – now that’s a song for a wedding waltz if you like that kind of thing).