Flight

So turns out, even in wanky business class with crazy seats that you can turn into sort of bed, the flight from Melbourne to LA is not fun at all. It didn't help that by the time I got on I had been awake for over 26 hours I guess though.

I wasn't really able to sleep properly kept waking up out of tiny naps from nasty nightmares or something that would make me kick and sweat and generally be unpleasant and confused. Also my bad knee was doing all sorts of weird shit and is still slightly swollen.

Still most of the trip had no-one near me, the last third had a lovely lady who was given a free upgrade after the girl next to her in economy got utterly wasted and passed out.

LA airport customs was also not fun. Did the crazy prison x-ray thing, did the waiting for an hour in line in a non-airconned room full of whining Aussies (seriously, when did we get more miserable than the poms? Jesus Christ). And also did the running around completely lost and unable to find a shower or a decent bottle of water or a dunny without a line a mile long. So on my last flight from LA to Seattle I smelled pretty special and felt even worse. Fortunately the dude next to me kept picking his noise the entire time so I'm not too worried about the impression I was leaving.

Seattle airport had free wifi thank god, so I could look up where my hotel was. Unfortunately I wasn't wearing my glasses... so you can guess what happened. Yep, misread an 8 as 5. So after taking the seatac (sp?) light rail into downtown Seattle, I spent a fun hour wandering around and annoying the crap out of all those charity sellers by asking for directions. The gay rights person that thought I was a dude had the best reaction, I must say.

Fortunately in the end I wasn't far from where I was actually meant to be. Turns out there are loads of Hyatts around Seattle so walking into the wrong one solved pretty much all my problems. Or gave me directions anyway.

Eventually I found my hotel, showered and then buggered around on the internet awhile. It took me like five minutes to work out how to turn the water to hot! Tried and failed to work out how to turn off the bloody lamps in my room. Then went to sleep for what I thought was a nap but turned out to be 3pm-ish to 5am-ish heavy sleep. With all the lights on.

And that was my first day in Seattle WA.

The next day was more interesting as I found the Pike Street Markets but I'm still working out putting pictures up so I might write about that later.

For those that travelled with me as a child (hi mum!) you will all be pleased to know that I can still only manage about a half a day walking around before my feet start hurting. Really seriously, I can barely stand type hurting. I believe it was the cause of many tanties as a kid because oh my god I can't walk any further, why are you making me do this pain...

Anyway.

So I'm taking it pretty easy and reading or working on projects about half of each day. It's really nice being able to set my own pace rather than try and keep up with people who have invincible feet. Being able to enjoy what I see rather than being able to unable to think of nothing but the pain... I'm beginning to understand what people get out of this.