So, Tuesday the 16th of July, at around 9:30pm, my girlfriend, housemate and I head to the Perth Domestic airport to make my first connection on my trip the US. I had a flight to Melbourne at 11:45pm, and felt terrible. Not because of the flight itself or anything - I didn't think I'd have any problems with being on a plane. No, for some reason, I got rather ill the night before. I couldn't sleep at all, and what little sleep I got was fitful and tense. I also had a rather nasty cold, which didn't make things any better. Still, I was all packed and geared up. My mother and her boyfriend had surprised me by showing up, and after sitting and chatting in the lounge, I got the boarding call, and off I went.

One of the biggest problems with flying is that they won't let you use digital cameras or devices while the plane is ascending and descending. Which really sucks if you want to get a nice shot of your home city in the middle of the night. Still, because I bought my camera duty-free, I wasn't allowed to open it until I went through customs at Melbourne airport. All up, the flight only took some three hours or so, and we touched down at around 5 a.m. Melbourne time. I had five hours wait. At five in the morning. So, with little else to do but make notes in my journal, I wandered into a McDonald's for a bite to eat. Then, wandered through customs, found my boarding gate, and killed the next four hours by opening and playing with my camera a bit, and also starting to read the complete "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, with all included appendices that I'd picked up a few days before. When you know you're gonna be spending a few days all up in travel time around the world, bring a BIG book.

Eventually, we whoosh off into the sky. Next stop - Los Angeles.

A plane exactly like the one I was on. I've marked where I was sitting.

Whee. Look how healthy and enthused I am.

Most of the trip was spent either reading LOTR, or trying to rest. I also ended up watching the film "Big Fat Liar", which was.. ok, given I didn't really have to pay for it. I'd gaze out the windows a fair bit too. The Pacific ocean is incredible when there's no clouds between you and it. I was vaguely praying that somehow I might see a pod of whales, or something like that. Sadly not. During the nighttime phase of the flight, I was actually able to see some stars. Wow. I guess you kind of need to be up high enough to see some of the greater details. Small wonder flight is so often an element in my dreams. Heh. A note in my journal - "Crossed equator. No more penguins." Around 5:49am LA time, I saw what I thought was the US coast as dawn broke. Aheh. I'm so dumb. It was the glare of light off the wing, as you can see in the picture at right.

Dawn over the Pacific.

Touchdown in LA around 8 am or so. And then the horror began. Firstly, LAX is... a horrid airport. Sorry, it just feels VERY wrong. The carpet reminded me of the school library in primary school. And the design... I swear Gary Gygax made it. Everywhere are small rooms connected by little tunnels. I was expecting to find kobolds in any one of them. Also, Customs. Oh god. OK, for anyone not in the know, I've got a slight paranoia/hyperanxiety complex. And they wouldn't let me through customs because I didn't know the address of where I would be staying in the US. In the end, I remembered *most* of Hooper_X's address in Atlanta, but not the number. A QANTAS rep tried to help me by ringing Information, but we couldn't find it. So, in the end, with half an hour before I was meant to board my next flight, I wrote down a fake number. I was seriously on the verge of tears and collapse, having also just spent some 13 hours straight in the air. Once I got through, I rushed, found my bags pulled aside and waiting. Refusing the trolley, I took off running. Why abandon the trolley? Well, good thing I did - a lot of it was uphill, and dragging my wheeled bag was easier than pushing. I was like some sort of demented, globe-trotting Ben Hur, chariot wheeling around behind me. I didn't even stop for a drink or food. Straight through, to where they were boarding. Once I got on the plane, I calmed down quickly. Ended up chatting to a fellow Aussie for a while too. The fact we had personalised TVs on each seat, and they also screened the wonderful Britcom "Black Books" made a difference.

In the end, the plane had pneumatic problems, and we left an hour late :/

LA smog is scarier than I thought possible. The actual flight out over the Pacific, and then back over the land is great though. Lunch was a lovely salmon and.. mixed veg, I think. It was nice though. Ended up also playing computer games on my entertainment unit - a trivia game, which asked me about colobus monkeys (my final year research project in university), and the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, one of my favourite number sets. It's an injoke.

Some time around maybe 6pm, I set down in New York, and met with Tonyfitz.

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Tonyfitz took me to his girlfriend Christina's apartment, where she had agreed to most charitably house me for my time in the Big Apple. Suffering from no jet lag at all, we did some toy shopping on the way there. Had my first Taco Bell for dinner, and spent some time chatting and conversing. The shower is the single greatest humanising experience imaginable after some 36 hours or so without  some way to clean or freshen up one's self. I intermittently had moments when doubt would cross my mind - I had crossed the Rubicon, and there was no easy way back now.

In the next couple of days, I managed to collect some 70% of my "shopping list" for BotCon - mostly RiD stuff, since Australia missed out on some 50% of the line.  Fortean events haunted us, after explaining to Tonyfitz the nature of the interconnectiveness of things - whilst talking of Seekers, he saw a kid in a soccer shirt reading "Seekers"; and walking to the till in a KB, a song comes over the PA - "Land Down Under", by Men At Work. It felt almost painful saying thankyou with my accent while someone sings about Vegemite sandwiches. I also got to try Wendy's! YUM. Also met up with another #wiigii!er, Spy.

UFOs! These are from the old World's Fair, and were used in the first Men In Black film.

Methinks someone had a bit of fun with this sign outside a car stereo store.

Wendy's! As endorsed by Pippi Longstocking!

The Unisphere, which was pretty impressive.

The plaque explaining the Unisphere.

GOD, was this nice.. a lasagna pizza, from Rosa's.  If you're in NY, find it. They rule.

Duckhouse! This just looked too cool not to photo.

Spy, Tonyfitz and Fin - Jack, King and Ace. Wendy can be the Queen.

Heh. It became a running gag to take photos of weird signs.

I had another feverish night on the Thursday, which I think I pushed over by dressing in jeans and two shirts, and sleeping with two blankets on the bed in hot weather. Nothing like raising your body temperature to denature a virus. Took a visit to the world's biggest Toys R Us, where we met up with fellow #wiigii!ers SwiftEagle, Quezovercoatl and Monocle.  Then we headed to the American Museum of Natural History, of which you can read about here.  After that, we headed to Swift's, where we watched the "Star Wars Holiday Special" (OH DEAR GOD THE PAIN. AND JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT ENDS, IT GOES ON.  And Bea Arthur.), and headed for pizza afterwards. Then we caught the trains back to the car, where we drove for another hour and crashed out.  The next day, I had to repack my haul, for I was on my way to Chicago by train!

Oh no! A T. rex loose in a TRU!	You can sorta make out the ferris wheel in this picture.	And a literal Barbie House.
Myself, Tonyfitz and Christina.	The bear guy! He's there every Sunday in Riverhead. I even saw him the day I left NY. I did wave to him.	Insert obligatory NY skyline picture *here*.