Plain

I was pretty impressed. After flying for 20 hours, about 17,000km, the plane was only 1 minute behind schedule. And yet CityRail can easily manage a to have the train 15 minutes late on the way to the city. Oh, and loved the buses replacing the trains on the Airport Line too.

The flight itself though, was nearly faultless. The lovely woman at the check-in desk booked me in for emergency row seating for both legs of the flight. That was so good, it really made the biggest difference.

Like my BA flight to London, each seat had it's own TV console. Babylon AD wasn't too bad, but the Stepford Wives sucked quite badly. There were also games on there, so I got my daily chess fix too. I did manage to crash the console though, so the last 4 hours of the SYD - HK leg went without any AV. Cathay Pacific did give me a US$50 voucher for the inconvenience. I now have travel iPod speakers :).

The airport at Vancouver is very peculiar. It looks like it has heaved, several times. The light fittings are all misaligned. Bizarre. Also, they have gone to a lot of trouble to provide some interesting features, like waterfalls. It was a pleasant change from all the sameness of all the other airports. Unlike what Paul Kelly has sung "Every .... city looks the same".

Somehow I managed to sleep a little. So it seems that I mostly avoided the jetlag difficulties. We'll see. Brett and Cheryl came and collected me from the airport. Bless :). Cheryl came in with a spare snow jacket. Thanks Brett! It started snowing just as we left the airport. Vancouver has been just great. But more about that later....