virgin blue can kiss my ass

I'm here in Perth, WA. Made it safely after 24 hours of travel and enduring the heat in Los Angeles. California weather is supposed to be cooler than AZ but this past weekend it was not and my sister doesn't have air conditioning. But Golden Spoon made up for the heat :) Oh and did I mention that someone at JPL thought it would be ok to give me my plane ticket for the Phoenix-Burbank portion of my trip in Pasadena? So when I showed up at the airport in Phoenix on Friday, US Airways, god love em, wouldn't let me on the plane because I didn't have a paper ticket. They wanted me to purchase another ticket from them, but b/c it was labor day weekend they couldn't get me on a flight until 6pm....more later running to dinner.

ok so enough with America's Worst or whatever they call themselves these days...

I brought too much stuff and I'm wishing that I had forced myself to bring less. oh well. all of the food and sanitary items will disappear as time goes on and instead that bag will get filled with samples.

Got to Australia, no hitches. At Customs they washed Simon's boots because they had "soil" on them (BTW, Brian, so glad you sanded my hammer, no dirt there!) I will never voluntarily fly Virgin Blue again. I guess it is a merging of Jet Blue and Virgin, both of whcih I have had great experiences with. Flying to LOndon on Virgin was wonderful b/c they gave us slippers and free headsets. Jet Blue has great snacks and free tv. So how come Virgin Blue can't get it right? They charged for EVERYTHING. It was a 5 hour flight and they wanted to charge me $3 for water! So all drinks you had to pay for and there was a menu for which you could purchase food. The food part didn't bother me, becasue many airlines these days charge additional for meals, but for srinks was ridiculous, especially on such a long flight. They had tv but wanted you to pay $10 to watch it! So on a 5 hour flight, no food, no drink and no entertainment unless you paid extra. Dumb. Why not just charge everyone $20 more for their ticket and include all that? It would make everyone a much happier camper, especially me after 19 hours of travel.

so there.

Miss you all. We're off to the North tomorrow am and ten spend the next week and a half driving down the center of Western Australia. We've been told to watch out for Kangaroos, they have a tendency to hop out in front of your car! Probably won't have internet, but maybe... and I will probably have more exciting things to report


ps its kind of cool to see eucaliptus trees in their natural setting :)