After 1.5 days of sitting around in airports, on planes, taxis, Decay and I are finally sitting in our hotel room in New York! It's 12:19am Thursday 4 December where we are, and I'm not sure that having been through two Wednesdays really helped either of us ...

I'll apologise now for the incoherency of the entire post - some sleep may be in order, but my brain's telling me it's 5:30pm on a Thursday, not 1:36am ...

We'd organised for the house of Decay and Droidy to be looked after, so we might still have live fishies when we get back ... Unfortunately, Trout A La Creme and Suicidal Haddock decided to join the big fishbowl in the sky on the morning of our wedding day, so less fish to keep fed... or something.
The esteemed Grumbler offered to chauffeur us to Melbourne Airport, since he was working nearby anyways ... we arrived, did the usual checking stuff in and just missed out on a Maccas breakfast ... so we had Burger King chips and some coke ...

The plane was nearly ready for takeoff, and was going through all the safety check things when an issue with the brakes popped up and said, Hi! This problem was what eventually caused us to miss our original connecting flight from LAX to JFK, and the rebooked flight ... which meant that we ended up waiting in LAX until 2:20pm ... after having arrived there at 8:40am. There is some sort of art to queuing up and not going insane, but it involves people lining up in the correct place and not just pushing to the front of the line because they came in from the wrong way. However, having working brakes on a plane is a much better proposition than working out that you can't stop when you're trying to land...

Oh yeah, I actually did have a topic for this, didn't I? What was the food for this first flight with Qantas? For lunch, there was a choice of beef with mushroom sauce, or chicken in honey coriander sauce, both served with a salad, some cheese and crackers, and a kit-kat. Both of us opted for the chicken, my theory being that the coriander taste can't be as strong as the mushroom taste could be. *shrug* ... it was ok, edible, and presented decently enough, as far as plane food goes anyways ...

At some point in the afternoon/evening/whatever timezone they were reprogramming us for, we were handed a snack bag containing a bottle of water, a mini mars bar, some salted macadamia nuts, and some dried fruit and nut mix ... as far as snack foods go, it's pretty hard to go wrong with the presentation of pre-packaged goods like these...

Breakfast was ... some Just Right cereal, some fruit, and a blueberry muffin-ling... since we were seated in the arse-end of the plane, the hot breakfast option had already run out ... at the melbourne time my brain may or may not have been operating on, I didn't really care what it was - we were just getting *mildly* annoyed with the kid seated near us, whose parents/extended family couldn't seem to keep him under control ... if I were sitting in the aisle seat, I would've been highly tempted to accidentally stick a leg out, but I might be too nice to do that if I'd actually been able to sleep ... sitting in the cattle class is not the way to catch some shuteye, really!

Once we'd gone through customs (and marvelled at how little Decay looks like his passport photo ...), and done the bag re-checking in at the same time as attempting to find another flight to get to New York. There were many tetchy people, but methinks Decay and I were just looking forward to getting to the hotel and crashing out on a bed, instead of what passed as a chair with reclining abilities in the plane, with screaming kids and people spraying bad perfume about as accompaniments... Even Tetris on the personal TV screens couldn't distract either of us enough ... it might even deserve a separate entry ... (:

After all this running around and re-booking connecting flights and stuff, we ended up on a United Airlines flight to NY, scheduled to leave at 1:05pm. Whoa, old-school plane! We had a projector-screen! And mini-pretzels! For most of this flight, I know I was attempting to get as much sleep as possible, away from screaming, karate-attempting kidlets ... there were kids on the flight, but they were of the non-screaming type ... Lunch was ... Hmmm.... we were on the arse-end of the plane again, so we missed out on what choice there was on offer - bbq chicken, or creamy tortellini ... negative points for the presentation ... it didn't look anywhere near appetising... even though it didn't taste all that horrible, it wasn't like they made it look decent to eat or anything ... that and they had pepsi, not coke ...

Post luggage collection and navigating through JFK airport, we stepped outside. COLD! I think the taxi driver dude we had didn't know where he needed to go to get to the hotel we'd been booked into ... so we got an impromptu tour of NYC ... or something. At least, that's what I'm saying (:

Yes, and I am typing this via high-speed wireless internet access available at the hotel we're staying at. As if we would pass up such an opportunity! *grin* Post-sleep tonight, we'll go and figure out what we want to do tomorrow, besides buy some gloves so we don't freeze our fingers off...