Procrastination Opportunist

OK, this is cheating, as I am writing this entry well after the events took place. At least I now know the ending was happy (by which I mean no death).

I started my trip on the morning of Friday 2 July 2010 with a trip in to work. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, but work has a habit of filling the amount of available time in which to do it.

After the initial rush and stress, and once everything was under control, leaving was rather sad. Naturally because I was leaving work and colleagues behind, but also because I had briefed the new staff member, David Sim, that morning, who was so relaxed and capable that it felt a real shame to be missing out on working with him presently.

Goodbyes had sort of already been said, as I had had a leaving party the previous evening and drinks in the mid-morning of that same day. At those drinks I was presented by my colleagues with gifts for travel, including, I was later to find, a plug for converting all sorts of foreign plugs to New Zealand power sources, very useful if I had toured the world already, bringing home all sorts of weird and wonderful appliances, but less useful for my purposes. However, goodbyes were no less difficult. Mix was very helpful - I had still not packed properly and so I totally scammed him into helping me move my stuff into storage.

When I finally left work at 1pm or so, I was stoked to pass Mike Crowl on the street. The man had been trying to avoid my goodbyes (completely accidentally, I realised) but he could not escape the spectacle I created by hooting and parking very quickly and unevenly on yellow lines, to rush over and hug him.

I arrived in Christchurch at 5.10pm or thereabouts, almost in time to pick up Mike, Mon's dad, from the airport, but not quite. So I went around to Dom's and found him sitting around playing basketball on the PS3 with his flatmates. I was immediately subjected to a losing cause as I joined Dom's team (I'm sure the controls were malfunctioning; at least, that's what Dom said) and we only lost by 40 points or so.

We then went to the Johnsons' for tea and were joined by the smack man as well, before the lure of the football at 2am (!) called him away. Mon was keen on the same thing, so Dom and I ended up dropping in on Mike Murray, and of course, going to Mackers. What use does sleep serve before a long trip? Four and a half hours' sleep does the job.

The first real travel obstacle took very little time in raising its somewhat ugly head; my luggage was quite overweight. Even when shared with Mon, we were 6 kg over the 46kg weight limit. With the distance we were going on the first leg to Frankfurt, I was going to have to fork out $48 per kg. However, all was not lost, as we were served by a redhead and I was able to turn on the charm that comes so easily to me with that species. Either that, or she could not be bothered with the paperwork, so she first offered only $20 per kg and an opportunity to repack, and finally she ignored all of the overweight baggage completely. Problem solved.

One ushj goodbye to Roz and Dom later, we were flying to Sydney. I realised to my dismay in the Sydney airport that Mon was a keen shopper, something that she had hidden from my ignorant self for years. Granted, we did have Mackers for breakfast, something in my favour, so in my satiated state, I had no problem with Mon wandering the shops.

Finally we were off to Frankfurt, with only one stop (a refuel in Singapore) on the way. The movies were unfortunately rather average; I had to turn off "Edge of Darkness" simply because the max volume of the headsets was not loud enough to convey the mumbly plot developments accurately. I did enjoy "How to Train Your Dragon" however, and "Ghost Writer" with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor felt like a solid movie, appropriate for a plane at least. Then I had to pretend I didn't know Mon, as she cried over some movie in which nothing sad happened. I think the other passengers were sympathetic to my situation - the male ones at least.

The lights were turned off in the plane from Singapore to Frankfurt for far too long (10 out of the 13 hours, I swear) probably because the stewardesses wanted to do less. Clearly it worked for the girl beside me (not Mon) who was either sleeping or faking it pretty well, for 12 hours.

Once we landed, the car hire actually went without a hitch. The concern was of course, that my driving would expose any number of "hitches". However these concerns proved baseless, as it did not take too many scrapes, dings, and injured pedestrians for me to get the hang of driving on the other side of the road. We set the GPS to avoid all toll roads, and set off for Strasbourg. This worked very well, although we should have made a map of where we went. To illustrate how necessary this was, we stopped for breakfast on an unknown street of an unknown town in an unknown district of an unknown country. I am almost not joking about the last one: it was probably Germany, but it may have been France. The travel was enhanced by the fact I could simply plug my ipod straight in to the car, which played it without fuss. Air conditioning also helped.

We arrived in Strasbourg and parked the car in very fortunate Sunday free parking circumstances, and walked around the old town. I sniffed out a Mackers, where we had lunch (Mon was able to take charge of the ordering, this time). We both started flagging, so we headed back to the hotel, where we crashed almost immediately (crashing in the falling asleep sense). We did manage to rouse from slumber in the early evening to head in to the old town for dinner (not Mackers, despite my pleas; we went to a pizza/pasta place instead). The heat was not conducive to having drinks, so we got water only on the way back to the hotel. We walked around a little after dark, but the time without sleep was taking its toll, so we decided to turn in at some unreasonably reasonable hour.

That's chapter one, and less than 1/5 of the trip. How will my two readers contain their excitement and anticipation while waiting for the rest??