Finally. I’m stateside. Talk about a cluster. It just shows you what happens when you fall off the travel conveyer belt after a while. You lose your edge. What a mother of all effort. All I know is that I am at least 10 pounds heavier as a result of the 432 bamboo baskets of dim sum I inhaled these past few days, the excessive amount of beer, wine and champagne that may have passed my lips (which I only drank mind you to help calm my nerves and not offend my hosts) and the 12 solid hours I just spent at 2 CX lounges.
I think all the humid Hong Kong air caused my pants to shrink. This meant I had to go full on Asian and buy a polyester track-suit. You know the ones with the elastic waistband. Shiny gold color to boot. Man oh man, someone should have told me about these wonderfully eclectic fashion garments years ago. To annoy my daughter and wife, when I see them, I am going to wear white socks with my glistening new outfit and pull the pants up as high as they will go before I choke on my own walnuts.
FedEx showed up just prior to 11am HKG time and I was in a cab within 20 minutes, weaving my way down off The Peak and heading to Chek Lap Kok. For about the 16th time in 4 days. At least that’s what it felt like.
Rose, the most underworked housekeeper in HKG did a jig as she handed me the Fedex envelope, relishing in the fact that me leaving meant one less person to feed. And fewer pairs of underwear to iron. Another friend of the boys had appeared on the doorstep on Sunday so I was kicked out of the spare room to make way for her and sent to bunk down in a storage room on a blow up bed for my last night in Honkers. I felt like Harry Potter in the first few movies, you know, when his bedroom was under the stairs.
That’s the thing about expat life. If you live in places like Singapore and Hong Kong and you have a guest room, you will be inundated with wandering travelers. All the time.
People who you barely recognize will call you up…
“Hey Simon how are you, its Nick”
“Nick who?”
“Nick Williams. You know, I used to date your sister”
“Dude, that was in the 4th grade”
“Yes, it has been a while”
“Anyway, I have 5 kids now and my 2nd wife and I are coming through Singapore and were wondering if we could crash a few days”
“Umm. Sure. I suppose”
“Can you pick us up?”
“I guess. Anything else?”
And then my wife would go semi-postal as when the person who we hardly knew rolled up with his tribe, I would conveniently have a work trip and leave for a week. That woman had zero tolerance, I tell you.
I thought the CX flight was just ok. Nothing special. I didn’t want to be rude when the polite staffer offered me a bottle of Krug although I did object a little bit when they served the champagne at the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
I politely told the vague CX staffer that you could be arrested for serving bubbles that warm. There was much scurrying and cussing from the galley in New Zealand and moments later, a much colder bottle appeared.
Apparently that crazy travel blogger, Lucky, reckons that CX is the most comfortable bed in the sky. Which I think is stretching it. Ok, it’s very pleasant and it certainly is a wide seat, bit there’s just something about CX’s product now that is not quite right. I cant put my finger on it. Kinda like that weird Uncle at Christmas who keeps to himself in one corner of the room, says nothing to anyone all day and then, right before he’s about to leave, starts calling everyone Helen. In Portuguese. You know nothing good would come out of looking at his browser history.
To me, LH F nails it. Every time. I am biased about EK so we wont go there.
Although I quite liked the new Pier place near gate 65. I started out at The Wing and then got bored. So I trekked down to The Pier and found a very nice corner with a rather elegant high back chair and an ottoman and basically moved in for the next 720 minutes.
12 hours in an airline lounge is nothing if you ask me. It is but child's play. I have a high threshold of pain when it comes to camping out in these places as some of you know.
To occupy the time, I went and had a massage – but was somewhat dismayed when the nice young lady told me to put all my clothes back on. Not having had a massage in Asia fully clothed before, I decided to keep an open mind and try it.
Completely overrated if you ask me. Useless in fact.
Anyway.
The dining room at The Pier had a weird feel to it – it felt like a school canteen. Place had bad juju and I think when the local CX head honchos came to hire the Feng Shui man to bless the new digs, they must have ran out of money when they got to that part of the joint.
I think airlines need to go all out at their home port when it comes to their own lounges. Qantas, who are tighter than the proverbial fish's bum even capitulated when it came time to build their new F lounges. They threw caution to the wind and hired some chic interior design firm, who must have been slightly inebriated when they crafted their bid because they added many zero’s after the initial estimate. I think they sent it in as a joke.
Even though bashing Qantas is a national sport and a revered Aussie pastime, I have always been impressed with the way Qantas approaches lounges. You should be too.
The rather frightening thing I realized as I approached the edges of the US is that my solo journey was about to be rudely interrupted.
You see, my wife was landing within 5 minutes of me. She had, to my astonishment, booked an AirBnB joint and said that it was ok if I crashed there with her. Our daughter was airborne, and was due to land in the wee hours of the coming morning.
But like many things with travel and our family, things were not well in Venice Beach. For starters, my wife had rented a car. This for most people is a relatively straightforward affair.
However, the vehicle they gave my wife, well someone had recently power vomited in it. Not wanting to be rude and say anything, the mother of my children drove around with her head shoved out the window and telling herself that “the smell will buff out”. Which it clearly did not.
Then it disintegrated further when she got to the AirBnB. It literally was in a ghetto. As in the ghetto. She refused to get out of the car and promptly spun around and scurried back to the airport.
No sense of adventure is all I can say.
So we ended up getting a room at the Hyatt Regency. My wife then regaled me with the horrors of her travel experience that day. I essentially told her that stuff like that never happens to me and that she must have just been unlucky.
We’ll all be running for the hills if she ever does discover FT. Make no mistake, she’ll come after everyone. I wont even be safe in a Federal witness protection program.
In the immortal words of every child riding in the back seat of the family mini-van somewhere on a US interstate this week…
“Are we there yet?”
Well, yes we are. Sort of.