USA Day 1 - a day of firsts

Total States Visited: 1
Where Are We Sleeping Tonight: Doubletree LAX

We couldn't wait to get off the plane when we got to LAX after our 12 hour flight from New Zealand! It was relatively smooth (the occasional little bump but nothing scary) so we managed to get some sleep. We had plenty of leg room but the back of the seat in front of me was about a foot away from my face! I spent most of the flight watching movies and even the entire series of "Episodes" with Matt LeBlanc - I love having individual screens :)

Touching down in LA, we managed to travel back in time 17 hours! I am amazed at how run down LAX is - it's an old looking airport designed to get people out as quickly as possible - there wasn't even air conditioning! The immigration area was crazy - the queue for non US citizens had 3 large plane loads of arrivals and after stopping at the toilet, Clare and I were on the very end the queue. Slightly ahead of us in the queue was a man carrying a large cake... yes, a large cake. It looked like a chocolate bavarian but where has he come from and where is he going with a large cake?! Clare and I were throwing around possible scenarios (most of which were not good) when an immigration worker came up to us and asked which flight we had just got off. After we mentioned Air New Zealand, the airport employee said we could get on the end of the US citizen queue - which was 2 people! Hows that for luck :) With all the issues with getting to LA, I had the feeling in the back of my head that I was going to be refused entry. Thankfully I was worrying about nothing - the guy at immigration was friendly and welcomed us to his country (after we had our finger prints scanned). We got our bags easily and with one the many free trolleys (are you listening Perth airport?!) and customs was super quick and easy. Everyone here seems very friendly...

Next stop was the hire car company where we had booked their low end Jeep for our 3 month sojourn around The States. The only problem is we hadn't taken into account that the price we were quoted was before tax, which on a 3 month hire was several thousand dollars - seriously, our car hire cost doubled with tax! The only way we could see to save money was to not get insurance - not something that I was looking forward to considering neither of us had driven on the "wrong" side of the road before. Thankfully the car hire company guy worked his magic for us - he set us up as a corporate account which saved us just over a thousand dollars! Plus he gave us a free upgrade to a bigger and better car - a Ford 4x4 Explorer - and it's red! Driving to the hotel, the very first time driving on the "wrong" side of the road, I realised that maybe LA isn't the best place to learn how to drive in America. I kept going to use my left hand to change gears which resulted in me banging the door - fool! Thank God it's an auto!

The hotel is pretty good. Despite being close to the airport, I haven't heard a single plane. It was fantastic to finally have a shower after a couple of days - eww. Next we drove on the freeway (AHHH!) to Santa Monica to visit the pier. We played "Wack A Mole" and went on the roller coaster twice. Although it is a relatively small roller coaster, I found it a little scary, especially as I have never been on a roller coaster before. While we were on the roller coaster, they started up the music on the PA system. The first song - "I Come from A Land Down Under" - Clare and I couldn't believe it! Our next first was Taco Bell for dinner - yum :)

I can't wait for tomorrow. Bring it on!

A day in Auckland

After a stressful night full of concern, we arrived in Auckland this morning. Loaded up with carry-on luggage and pillows, we ventured through face recognition at immigration. Clare had problems as she has changed her hair since her passport photo was taken. So I unloaded everything so i could sit down while I waited for her to pass through immigration the old fashion way - I think that means she got an immigration stamp inner passport while mine just got scanned. Once she had joined me officially in New Zealand, I loaded myself up with everything and we went and checked my Visa status. The Air New Zealand staff were confused why I had had any problems - everything was fine. The girl back in Perth caused us unnecessary stress - hopefully thats the worst thing that happens on this trip! With my boarding pass to LA in my hand, I let out a sigh of relief.

We hired a car and spent the day driving around Auckland in a somewhat random fashion. We eventually stumbled across the Mission Bay Cafe where we had a delicious breakfast - mega yum! We then drove to the volcanic mound and collapsed volcano. It was kind of weird to think that there was this volcano right in the heart of a major city but cool never the less (no pun intended). After a nice relaxing day, we drove back to the airport.

Checking that we had all of our belongs out of the hire car, we couldn't find our holiday folder. We searched all through the car but it just wasn't there. Cue major panic. The folder not only had our itinerary, it had every hotel booking we had made and worst of all, all of our credit card information - if the wrong people found it, they could spend our entire US holiday funds! Rushing into the airport terminal, we headed to the cash passport help desk to report that our information was missing. the man at the counter said we had to nofity the cash passport people that we had lost our information... which is what we were trying to do. For reasons that I cannot understand, he didn't want to help us. he said we had to ring a particular number and pointed me to a pay phone. The number he told me to ring is some sort of number that you can call from pay phones - again, I don't know why. Back at the help desk, I told the man the number wouldn't work. Not believing me, he walked to the pay phones and tried it. Sure enough, I was telling the truth. Still unwilling to help me, he wouldn't use his phone or let me use it to report the lost info. Rather than turning into the Hulk, I walked away from him. We tried airport lost and found, and we tried the airline's lost and found - no body had found anything. With boarding about to start, we headed to the departure lounge in a state of despair. We simply had no choice but to deal with it in LA when we got there.

With Clare and I both at the end of our emotional tether, we broke down into tears as we waited to board the plane. Just as boarding was about to start, we were personally called up first. Low and behold, the wonderful Air New Zealand staff had our travel folder! It turns out that when I unloaded everything I was carrying at Immigration, the folder had fallen behind the chairs. They had found it and had been regularly paging us all day in the transit lounge, but as we had been driving around Auckland, we hadn't been in the transit lounge! Overly grateful beyond words, we were so happy to have the folder back in our hands - the Air New Zealand staff went above and beyond!

Once again, I hope that's the last thing to go wrong on this trip!

Let's Get Outta Here!

All holidays start with packing. It's something we all know we have to do. We had written up a list of things we needed to do before we could leave, which included tidying up the house for our house sitters - we certainly weren't going to leave our house sitting empty for 3 months. So in the middle of cleaning and packing, the house sitters arrived early! And then Clare's parents arrived to see us off. Rushing around in a hectic craze, we threw everything in the car, including our Canon 5D mark II and our Canon Powershot G11, jumped in and headed off up to Perth. As I always do on a 2 hour trip to Perth, my mind constantly asks "did we forget anything?" and usually it is something small, like I forgot to pack a jacket. By the time we got to Perth, we had realised that not only had I forgot to pack a jacket to wear in freezing cold New Zealand, but we didn't have an SD card for the G11, and we hadn't packed our portable photo hard drive to store all the photos we were going to take! Let's face it, it wasn't anything to bad, but we were going to have to assess what we were going to do when we filled up our CF cards and replacement SD cards. We got to the airpot early as we wanted to have a look around the duty free shops for SD cards and possibly a new laptop to store all the photos on. Checking in at Air New Zealand, the girl behind the counter had issues with Clare's USA visa. After checking with her supervisor, she managed to fix what ever problem she was having. Then, it was my turn - she was now having issues with my visa.

Possibly working her first day, the check in girl insisted that my visa hadn't been approved. Having checked online and having printed out the approval, I knew this wasn't the case. The girl said I needed to check that it hadn't been revoked so I headed to the nearest internet cafe and sure enough, there was nothing wrong with my visa. Back at the counter, the girl refused to believe me and after a very circular conversation where she said she was having a major problem with the system, she handed us over to her supervisor. The supervisor was very nice and apologised and said that she could see that my visa had been approved but that the system would no longer accept any input about it. She gave Clare her boarding passes to the US, but she could only give me my one to Auckland. We will have to deal with it in Auckland. I can't believe we spent almost 2 hours trying to check in.

The next stop was to pick up the travellers cheques Clare had ordered. Still worrying about the possibility of me being stranded in Auckland, we found out that Clare hadn't ordered 5 grand in travellers cheques - she had order 5 grand IN CASH! With the teller pilling up all these bundles of cash, Clare had a melt down - everything today had gotten too much for her. It turns out that no one does travellers cheques anymore as they are easily forged (could have fooled me - literally). We knew that we didn't want to walk around with $5000 on us, so we had to convert it over to the cash passport credit card. With our flight now boarding, we had to run to catch our flight.

Has it really been a year already?

It is fun watching movies set in the USA as 90% of the time I get to say "been there" - although I have started to cut back on doing that (mainly because I was annoying myself!). While it is a hoot and a holler to reminisce, I am amazed that it has been a year since we left on the holiday of a lifetime. Looking back at it, the 3 months we drove around the United States flew by so fast at the time that I had difficulty making sure I didn't fall behind in writing up each day's adventures in my journal. Some days were harder than others, like when we were sleeping in a tent in the middle of a forest. It's hard trying to write by moonlight - believe me, I've tried!

I have wanted to revisit my travel journal and so I have decided that I will post my journal entries here, on this blog. I will post each entry exactly as I wrote it in my Smiggle Travel Diary and try to post at least one new image for each day (considering we took over 1000 photos on the trip, it shouldn't be too hard). For the adventurous reader with nothing better to do, I will only post one entry a day so people can experience the journey exactly as my wife and I did. I am excited as I open the journal for the first time in almost a year... here's what it looked like at the start of the journey:

I guess you could say that if nothing else, this will be a good test of whether or not I can keep this blog up to date. I am excited to revisit the journey and I hope you are ready for 15,000 miles of road trip fun!

Eliminate the negative!

33. Accentuate the positive

"Life without pain has no meaning" - Arthur Schopenhauer

While Schopenhauer may have a valid point, I think it is how a person deals with their pain that defines their personality. Recently, I was made redundant at my place of employment - for the second time! 3 years ago I was made redundant when the TV network I worked at closed down its production department (it was reported on a rival network as being the largest TV production department in Australia). After a brief period, they approached me to come back as their secondary studio director for their live nightly news bulletin (which had been one of my roles when I was in production). Reluctantly, I agreed to venture back into the director's chair, mainly because I am friends with the director and he needed me to cover for him when he was sick or wanted to take holidays. I enjoyed directing the news more than I thought I would, certainly more than I used to back when I was expected to do my normal duties as well as the director's full work load. Trust me when I say that it isn't easy trying to do 16 hours worth of work in an 8 hour day, every day!

So back in May, during a 3 and a half week period where I was directing news (the regular guy was on holiday), I was told that it was likely that a new position was going to be created which would be a full time senior camera operator role which would also incorporate my current job of relief studio director of news. Talking with the head of the news department, she asked about my skills and what I thought of said position, which I expressed interest in. A few days later the new position is announced and advertised, for which I applied. I was amazed at how much the position was written specifically for me as after having worked in TV for over 15 years, I had all the experience required. A couple of days later, one of the regional camera operators came in for an interview for the position and I was surprised that he had as I didn't think he wanted to substantially increase his work load for the same pay he was already getting. I thought nothing else of it and looked forward to having my interview for the position.

The next thing I knew was that the other guy had been given the job and I hadn't even been asked for an interview. To say I was crushed would be an understatement, and the fact that I had a whole week ahead of me directing the news made me physically sick. Clearly, my life had been given more meaning... How could the head of the department not even ask me for an interview? Writing this now, I still feel like I was never really considered for the position which definitely hurts. Needless to say I pushed my self to stay professional and the news went cleanly to air that night. After two sleepless nights filled with depression, I decided to accentuate the positive. I wish I could describe how I went from having zero self worth to a point of joy - maybe I created a pro & con list in my head and just don't remember, but the truth is that I felt like I just decided to do it, initiating an instantaneous change.

I can recall that back when I was in high school, I adopted a "what's the worst that could happen" approach to life, carrying out my actions based on whether or not I could live with the worst case scenario (I can think of a couple of times where the worst case scenario I came up with was so bad that I chose inaction as my course of action). I still have that approach to life but I sometimes forget it, especially when strong negative emotions are involved. When I originally created my list of 40 goals, my father was losing his battle with cancer and every time the phone rang, I was expecting to hear the inevitable news. Far from accentuating the positive, I feared the phone and had to prepare myself to hear the worst every time I answered a phone. Sadly my father passed away just before Easter last year, a week before my sister's wedding. Life was a crazy emotional roller coaster.

It has taken me a while to rediscover how to look on the bright side and see the river lining, and I know I have reconnected with a "what's the worst that could happen" approach to life. With my own son on the way, I hope I can continue to accentuate the positive.

STATUS: 4/40 = 10%

Stand by for General Shenanigans!

7. Make a sketch comedy series.

For as long as I have known my nest friend Scott (26 years), we have always had similar tastes in comedy. We would watch the Goodies and Comedy Company, listen to Monty Python and the Goons, and we would say to our selves "we have to do our own sketch comedy show one day."

Back in 2002, I was talking to a different friend (James) and he convinced me to do a comedy TV show with him. It was going to be called CrassTV and we started working on ideas. Then he got a job teaching English in Japan and CrassTV was shelved.

Then I got together with some different friends (Jess, Neville and Brooke) and we decided to make a sketch comedy series to be called Mostly Filler. We had a team of writers writing scripts, we held casting over a couple of days (and saw hundreds of people), we cast a core team and started rehearsals. For reasons that I can't quite recall, we had a difference of opinions on which way the show should go, and sadly Mostly Filler was shelved.

With the bitter taste of failure in my mouth, I decided that sketch comedy was something that just wasn't going to happen. There was instead a Red Dwarf fan film competition I was going to enter. I wrote a B grade comedy horror short film called The Killer Bikini Vampire Girls. It had every cheesy cliche you could think of... it was so popular and so much fun that we did a sequel. And then another. And then another. We had a series of several more that we were looking at making, including a musical. Then one day, I was being interviewed for a job in production at a TV station and the station manager looked at me weird when he saw all the Killer Bikini Vampire girls films on my resume. I got the job but I felt I was known for the KBVG films only. For better or worse I decided that it was time to distance myself from the KBVG films. I moved on and did several dramatic films, all in the hope to show that I could do other things.

Then my friend Scott said "we really need to do that sketch comedy idea" and the ball was rolling. We threw around ideas, wrote sketches and then secured cast and crew. Although slightly behind my original schedule, we have filmed the majority of the sketches! There are a couple we have dropped because they have been done before, or they just weren't as funny as we originally thought, but we are looking good. Here is the first sketch that I have edited together:



From here we need to film one or two pickups and cutaways, then edit it together. We will then pitch it to several TV networks and hopefully, we will be picked up. We will also cut together a web series so I am well on track to fulfilling this goal :)

"Read it? I devoured it!"

I have always enjoyed reading - books, comics, the trivia on the inside of bottle tops - it doesn't matter what it is. Usually with books, I find that I take a while to get through them - one chapter at a time. I don't know if it is because the book doesn't grab my interest or if it takes too much energy to read. Perhaps I find it hard to find the time to actually sit down with the book...

None of that is relevant when talking about "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline.



When my friend Scott gave me this book for Christmas I was a bit "a book?" Not because I don't like books or that I think books are bad presents, it was because I was uncertain if I would like the book. Just because the giver likes a book doesn't mean the receiver will. My first impression was that this book was going to be about some kid back in the 1980s who liked to play computer games. Boy, was I wrong. Set in the no too distant future of 2044, the major of the world's population prefer to spend time in an artificial reality that makes the Matrix look like an 8 bit Sega arcade game.

I cannot remember the last I enjoyed reading a book as much as this one. I have devoured the occasional book in my time - The Red Dwarf Omnibus springs to mind, along with "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" by Mitch Albom. The Red Dwarf book was mainly retelling the TV episodes with added fleshier bits (which were what I enjoyed), leaving me a bit cold about the book because I felt that there wasn't enough new material. Mitch Albom's book is far from a happy book, pulling on emotional heart strings, but it was still a great book to read.

"Ready Player One" was fun and exciting and full of so many nerd and geek references that I could relate to the central character scarily well. For anyone who knows anything about AD&D, Atari 2600's, Monty Python, or 80's pop culture, this book is for you :)

STATUS: 3/40 = 7.5%