Eats Shoots and Leaves
We’re home. New York City seems like a very distant memory. The 5 days we spent there were pretty quiet. Took in all of the sights we missed in a previous trip including the Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, dinosaurs at the natural history museum and a trip up the Empire State building before Ozama does his stuff again. We had an unexpected treat when we saw Penelope Cruz being interviewed by David Letterman as we watched the late show being filmed.

Speaking of unexpected events, I got food poisoning from a dodgy prawn or two, in a restaurant themed around Forest Gump – the dish was described as ‘trash bucket’ – so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Typical really, travel all the way around the world and get sick 48 hours before flying home.

… This turned out to be a mere blip. Changing our flights regularly as we flitted about the planet became a way of life, the one flight we didn’t dare change was our last leg. Susie was only going to get 48 hours of UK time under her feet before heading back to work, so we took no chances. The flight had been confirmed since July 2004, so just try to imagine how pleased we were to be informed our tickets had been cancelled when I called 24 hours before our final flight home to see if the time had changed. To cut a long story short – a computer error (strange how people seldom take responsibility when things go wrong, but are happy to take credit when everything is OK) – resulted in American Airlines cancelling our final flight. Trying to convince their semi-trained customer-services-chimp to let us fly was simply not happening.

In desperation I called British Airways, who in all of the fiasco had genuinely done nothing wrong, other than lead us astray in the first instance by selling us the original ticket. After a cheesy “I called you because you are the world’s favourite airline and hoped you would be compassionate to help us out of our horrible predicament” we were on a flight at a similar time to our original flight.

Touching down in the UK we felt as if we’d only been away for a weekend. A surprise party for us on the Sunday brought together lots of friendly faces, a real welcome home.

Since we’ve been back lots of you have commented on how much you enjoyed reading this blog. It’s been fun writing it, hard at times finding the time and being careful to avoid being too explicit. At best you’ll feel inspired to visit some of the places, at worst you’ll learn from our experiences and holiday elsewhere.

… So what next? scale Everest’s north face? explore the Amazon by dug-out canoe? Nothing so straightforward I’m afraid, I have to try and find an employer willing to tolerate my uniqueness.

More news when it happens, I'll also upload a few photographs.
- posted by Adrian @ 9:49:00 PM