Skip to main content

Cancelled America


On days like today I look out of my office window and watch the big jets turn across the sky and head away east towards the USA. I especially like to see the biggest of them, the Qantas A380s and 747s as the roar overhead.

I could have been on one of those flights in a week and a half's time.

Late last year I took advantage of a half points deal and booked us flights on Qantas to New York via Los Angeles and returning from San Francisco. It was done in a rush and without as much forethought as was sensible.

Despite the ubiquity of the United States on our screens, in our culture as a whole, and even having read books on its history I realised how little I actually knew of the country.

That's understandable. It's bigger than Australia with many more people scattered across its reaches. It is a country that both celebrates and fights it's diversity, takes pride in its role in world affairs but apparently suffers ignorance of them.

The flights had us flying into and out of America's most expensive cities a continent apart with only two weeks between. We weighed options, minimising time in those cities, going through Canada, catching trains (oh how I'd love to explore the railroads). But it still ended up expensive and stressful just when the last, busiest term approaches.

Fortunately it is easy to cancel points bookings. We still want to go, but with less ambition and armed with more knowledge. Off on a road trip to Victoria instead.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My first overseas trip: Singapore and Malaysia

I've always loved to travel. My first memory is of sitting in a an aircraft, aged 18 months or so. Yet I never believed that I could travel overseas. To me, it seemed like something you did when you retired, or if you were rich. That all changed when I met B. She had not only travelled overseas, she was from overseas . B was born in Malaysia and arrived in Australia, with her family, in 1988. She still had relatives and friends in Malaysia and Singapore and she, along with the remainder of her family, planned to return for a visit during the Australian summer of 1995. At the time I was staying in B's mother's house while we were studying at university. After B's father passed away the year before I was the nominal "man" of the house and its high maintenance garden; her brother Michael was studying up in Queensland. B and I were quite inseparable and her mother kindly offered to pay for me to join them on their vacation. So it was that I obtained my very firs...

One night in Canberra

It's the April school holidays and we are too busy to have a break but need one because of that. And because it's the Easter weekend the options are limited, so we just drive down to Canberra for the night. No, this isn't our first trip for 2023. I wrote about Japan on another site .  I refuse to wake up early so we depart after 8.30 AM. There is not much to say about the drive except that the clouds seem so low and Lake George is very full. We stop at a rest area and at the lookout up the hill to take it all in. Everyone is hungry so we first stop in Dickson and then can't think of anything to eat, so I drive us to Civic, where we can't decide and end up eating at the Singaporean Killiney Kopitiam branch.  The Canberra Centre has nice shops. I dream of getting an iPad from the Apple Store, we buy a blanket and toothbrushes from Muji and wish that Lego wasn't so expensive. Nothing we can't get in Sydney, but then we rarely go out shopping in the city. It...