The next travel leg

OK, so I’m now a long way behind. I’m currently on my last leg of the return home, my flight from Sydney to Perth. But I’m in business class and I have internet, so lets see if I can’t pump out a few more posts before I decide to do work or play Civ!

So IC finishes and my holiday begins, but I have to get there first! I headed off back down to Hartford. There were a few times where I thought I would have a passenger, but it ended up just being me. I realised that my trip has quite a lot of driving. I do enjoy driving but it takes more concentration in the US as everybody is on the wrong side of the road! It’s not a long drive to Hartford, just under an hour but the problem was that I couldn’t check into my hotel until 3 meaning I had a bit of time to kill.

Anyone what to guess what I did? I went to Target (because they always have a Starbucks in the US) and I got a coffee! I also got pumpkin loaf, because well it’s good and we don’t have it here. That effectively gave me enough time to go find my hotel and check in.

It was nice. They had a pool that I was keen to use, but there were a lot of other people in it and I didn’t really want to share. This is me being introverted, needing some alone time after all the people at IC. I had a drink and and some chips and watched some Masterchef – me relaxing and having my alone time! I had some food, but not enough for a full meal so I decided to walk down to McDonalds (how adventurous of me), came back, ate that, watched more Masterchef!

A brief aside, because I forgot to mention this before – the food at UMass was fantastic. Admittedly it’s probably not a fair comparison, but relative to Uni food in Perth I can see why UMass has won best campus food 2+ years in a row. All the food we had was really good.

Then it was time to shower, shave etc. It was time for my holidays and as I had a few minutes I thought I should was my hair and shave etc. (Please note I did shower during IC, it was just usually done quickly as it was a busy time – this was more relaxed). I then packed which was a bit problematic. This is the same issue I ran into last year. When I have a car it’s fine. If I’m driving around I don’t have to fit everything into my suitcase, I can take backs of things, keep my dirty clothes seperate etc. The problem is going to a new place, where I have to fly, I have to refit everything into my suitcase. I also tend not to have as much room for food etc that I’ve bought. I had quite a lot that I had to go through – some of the things I throw out included a bath mat (another this UMass doesn’t provide) paper tower, a wine glass, chips and other food I hadn’t eaten yet – you see the problem! Anyway I got that all together and sorted.

Then I had a relatively early night – did I mentioned my bad planning with flight bookings. I had a 6am flight so I had to get up at about 3.45. Thankfully, the airport was literally less than 5 minutes from my hotel so that was all relatively easy and returning the rental car was no problem (even though no Hertz people were in attendance). Anyway, that the next post – see you there!

Oh, I’m not sure if I ever showed you the car I had in Massachusetts – here’s a picture of the Mum van I was driving!