So long USA

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We had quite a busy day ahead of us on leaving Tahoe, we needed to drive 3 hours to San Fran, find the airport hotel, get as many hours sleep as possible and then get on two planes before arriving at Fiji. So with my giant pine cone sat on the dash board of the car we checked out and headed back to San Fran.

The drive down was picturesque (a couple of times I saw a deer of some kind jumping up the hilly sides of the road) and we spent most of it reminiscing about stuff we’d already forgotten we’d done (good thing we have this blog) and what we’d loved and not really enjoyed (see previous rant). About an hour outside San Fran we had to stop off at the town of Berkeley to get some Fijian dollars from a bank kindly suggested by Rayleen (thank you). Being an unusual currency I’d had to pre order and all they could scrape together was $700 which is about £220 quid, we were gonna look like millionaires (well almost).

Whilst there, we decided we would post off my Xmas decorations and burn some DVD’s of all our photos. However postage out of the US was much more than we expected, using UPS and FedEx it would have cost between $50-100!!! It was suggested we try the US post Office which I assumed was UPS but it turns out that is in fact the united postal service which is a completely different thing, so now I’m carrying my decorations around in the bag still, awaiting a postal price I’m happy to pay!! We also tried 5 different shops that had DVD burning equipment and none of them could help us, they either needed to send them away for a few days, or wanted to charge us to use their own make of DVD or an hourly burning rate which with our thousands of photos would have worked out cheaper to buy our own equipment. Berkley is a university/college town but it seems without being a student we had no hope. So all we can hope now is we can burn them all in New Zealand when we get to our friend Bens house - ho hum.

On leaving Berkeley for the high way into San Fran (after crossing kamikaze alley - 4 lanes of cross traffic in the way of our let turn onto the highway - at 5pm!!) I realised I wasn’t completely sure of the hotel we were heading for so we spent most of the journey trying to keep up with a local bus on the Bay Bridge that we could piggy back for wifi connection. This was great for a short while as I managed to make it to my email page but when trying to open the confirmation the lanes of traffic changed and we could no longer keep up with the bus - nooooooo. By the time we pulled up at what I thought was the hotel, we finally got online to find that we were indeed right -phew. Nice cheap travel lodge with internet and the soothing sound of aircraft every few minutes. We kept thinking we’d left a window open but it was just the rubbish single glazing.

I must admit to being nervous and preoccupied most of the night as the flight to Fiji over all that water was the one flight that was really making me nervous. It sounds stupid and I know the physics against my worry but going over land doesn’t bother me as if you crash that’s pretty much it, where as over water (in my head) you crash into the water and if you survive that you can look forward to drowning afterwards (yes I know the water would be as hared at that speed as the ground but fear is irrational people and I am irrational about flying.

Next morning we returned our sexy car - with a lump in our throats at saying good bye to our metal friend we headed for our plane to LA. The flight on Virgin Atlantic was great, very short but I almost wished it had been longer as the facilities on the plane were brilliant, brand new it seemed and lots of free media stuff to do whilst there. On arriving in LAX we looked around aimlessly for the departures terminal and were helped eventually by a staff member with a clip board -but no not a staff member at all it seemed, not even a nice passer by, - a tout asking us to sign up for something and give money to some charity. I love charity and give what I can, I work for a bloody charity but can we not get any help for free in this place!! Needless to say we walked away (we had our information now after all bwhwhahaahahah). We’d been expecting LAX to be huge with loads of shops etc but we disappointed to find it was broken into about 12 terminal buildings all separate form each other. Ours was under construction everywhere and there were about 4 shops and 4 restaurants (luckily one was MacDonald’s!!).

We had hours before we could even check our luggage in then hours after that till the flight. We spent all of our time (once our bags were checked in) sat on really hard plastic seats using the free wifi, knowing we probably wouldn’t have access in Fiji. I was really nervous by then, spending much of my time in the bathroom (sorry). So time went on and on and on and suddenly we realised we only had half hour till boarding, which was fine if we happened to already be airside!!!! We had completely forgotten to go through security and wait; we’d both thought we were already there so just needed to wait for our boarding to be called. We rushed to join the back of huge queue, when Nath went and asked if we’d be late by waiting. We were told we should have gone through ages ago and were sent straight to the front of the queue. Never before have I been so frustrated by people not understanding what they did and didn’t need to remove etc. By the time we got through they were actually calling our names over the tanoy for last call for boarding!! After a bollocking from the air hostess at the gate for being 45 mins late we got on the plane. Don’t you just hate those last minute passengers, I know I always think ,where the hell were they, they must have known it was time etc etc, well now that was us!! Whoops - so we slunk into our seats and hoped the throwing of rotten fruit would cease eventually!!

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