Ginger Without Borders

This is Dad from Australia (We made it here). As the readers of this blog know from Lena, my passion is string band music, particularly bluegrass. Well, last week I was participating in Raleigh’s biggest economic development event of the year, Wide Open Bluegrass. For a week, I was presenting panels on the business of bluegrass beginning at 9am and listening to as many bands as I could until 1am Tuesday through Saturday night. Not much time left for sleep. The motto of the week has always been “I’ve Been Mostly Awake” which comes from the short form (IBMA) for the International Bluegrass Music Association, Raleigh’s partner in Wide Open Bluegrass. I take that motto as my instruction every year, and this year was no exception even though I had the Australia plane trip on my mind all week.

Luckily for me, our plane to Brisbane did not leave until Tuesday, October 1, so I had a couple of nights to recharge a little of my lost energy before the late afternoon flight to LAX. To be completely honest, I have had a secret dread of this plane trip since we began planning our visit. It is not that I have any fear of flying. It is just the painful memories of trying to sleep sitting up in the space a body can barely squeeze into to sit that passes as a plane seat these days, and then being awakened six hours into what passed for sleep because the plane was landing. While Dawn and I have been fortunate enough to visit Europe several times, we always arrived sleep deprived. It then took several days for our bodies to catch up to the time change. Australia was going to be five hours to LA and then 14 hours to Brisbane. And as the week began to sap my energy, my brain would not stop dwelling on those cramped conditions for a trip that would be more than twice as long as our usual European ones.

The American flight to LAX seemed longer than its five hours (and two and a half movies). We also followed a lightning storm which played in the clouds for the last hour before we landed. I flew in a plane that was hit by lighting during my work years (we landed fine but the plane’s body had a hole the size of a silver dollar created by the strike) so that sapped more energy out of my brain.

Our LAX landing gate was at the very tip of Terminal 4 but we soon discovered that our Brisbane flight left out of a remote lot. So we got to walk ourselves and our luggage the entire length of Terminal 4, run up a flight of escalators to the bridge to Tom Brady International, follow the signs that directed us down a crooked path winding 2/3 of the length of TBI, and finally rode down two flights of escalators to the ground floor of the 1950’s hanger where you wait to board the buses to the remote lots at LAX (the hangers doors were constantly open, so the night air at least made it cooler that the terminal). As our bus drove past the hangers for the Federal Express cargo planes, a fellow passenger joked (with some justification) that we seemed to be driving to Australia. The remote lot appeared to be just a concrete box to which a passenger boarding ramp was attached. No elevators up two stories, just a concrete ramp you had to walk with your luggage. Dawn and I estimated that we had walked about twice as long as out normal walks with Zevi the dog, only this time we were carting our luggage.

Perhaps all that exercise brought with it several blessings. One, when the doors closed on the plane, we had an empty isle seat next to our window and center seats. Second, our Quantas airplane was virtually brand new. While the seats were still fairly close together, the seat backs had new places to store the small things (like glasses and iPads) that were always looking for a home in the “old days.” And these seats had a novel foot web that was like a hammock for your feet. Third, Quantas offered nice thick seat blankets, firm and larger pillows and (Fourth) free spirits. I feel asleep watching my movie after our Irish beef stew dinner (maybe the Jack helped).

After Dawn woke me by leaving her seat for a walk around, I gathered my pillows, figured out how to get my feet in their hammock, pulled up my blanket and fell back to sleep for eight hours. On reflection, the 14 hour jaunt over the Pacific actually seemed shorter than the 5 hour flight over the US. So upon our arrival in Brisbane, we were somewhat rested. So, I will now have to acknowledge that my daughter was correct when she told me that the Australia trip is ‘better’ than a flight to Europe because you can get a nice long sleep. And Australia uses a lot of electronic screeners, so we cleared customs almost as fast as we walked.

PS, Lena, your mother and I are happily spending your inheritance and Mom says she hasn’t needed to kill me yet. But we are both ready to kill the Garmin (our next story).