This Good Friday gave us a feed of fish and a flight to Asia

We were all packed and ready to go by the time Emma arrived, other than a few files I wanted to transfer to my recently purchased and carefully  prepared 64GB USB.

To give you some context on the USB thing I should explain that when I pack I generally have twice the weight of  “electronic support stuff” than I do clothes.

Those that know me know that my idea of a rough holiday is one where the TV in the room where we are staying has only 5 channels or worse still it doesn’t have a USB port for me to play movies and TV shows I load up onto a drive or USB.

This holiday I wanted to be sensible with the stuff I was going to bring because experience has taught me that ~75% of the crap I bring is not needed nor used.

Let’s face it, a couple of USB chargers are enough, as is ONE VGA lead and ONE HDMI lead etc, etc.

To make a long sad story short – I left all my, and just mine, USB storage at home! DAMN!

There’ll be no catching up on the TV shows I was so looking forward to.

Tiz and Emma are fine though. They have all the music and shows they asked for to put on their USB’s. 

Funny thing is that neither of them would care if they didn’t have it, even though they are very grateful that they do.

My friend Nic had a friendly swipe at me a while back for being too dependent on electronics media and suggested I get a good book to read instead.

Well, I am pleased to say that I have the two books Nathan Millward wrote about riding his postie bike from Sydney to London and later across America.

I have been meaning to read them for a long time, so I am now convinced that the lack of USB’s happened for a good reason.

We got to Tullamarine two and half hours before the scheduled boarding time and the queues were already two suburbs long.

This was particularly annoying, as I had spent a long time trying and failing to do a web check in, which would have put us at the head of the queue.

                      

We joined the interminably long queue and just waited patiently as we crawled forward towards the check in.

The woman/mother in front of us noticed the WOFTAM (Waste Of Time And Money) Motorcycle Club Inc. badge on my backpack and proceeded to tell me about her Dad and how he had bought a basket case Harley and was going to fix it and he would be a great candidate for the WOFTAM MC.

I couldn’t resist having a good-natured dig at her Dad’s choice of money wasting, oil leaking, and unreliable agricultural equipment.

She got the hint very quickly and then moved onto how her husband and sons should get priority over other passengers for the exit aisle (extra legroom) seats.

I suggested that if her 6’ 6” male family members didn’t want to be scrunched up in cattle class she should pay a little extra for the exit aisle seats like we had.

She didn’t agree believing that it should be a given that tall people should receive special treatment by airlines.

Really?

Thankfully after they had stood in our queue for well over thirty minutes she realized they could have expressed their way through the web check in queue.

Adios tall people.

The rest of the check in went just fine with nothing out of the ordinary to report.

The plane ended up taking off a little late, at 1:00am.