Entries Tagged 'Travel' ↓

So I’m back again, which means I’m travelling again. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it – I haven’t done well at recording my last few trips – heck I did no posts at all for New Zealand. But I’m going to try, because when I do write, I really enjoy looking back at it. I might try and keep the posts briefer and maybe more frequent, but I’m pretty’s sure I’ve said that before!

So here goes, I’m in the US again, for FPS IC 2024 and although I’m sure I’ll be back in future years, I decided to make this year a real holiday trip to, with a view to not doing that so much in future years (or at least for a little while).

I’m currently sitting at my AirBnB in Chicago, on Saturday 2 days after I arrived. Not a lot’s happened so far but let’s go back to the start. I left Perth at 9am Thursday morning, which meant early-ish but nothing too ridiculous. I must say I love the perks of Gold, getting me to the front of the line everywhere. So Qantas Club, flight to Sydney. It was on a 737 which is small but it’s a short flight. We arrived a bit ahead of schedule which was good, no danger of missing my next flight. Transfer to the international terminal was easy, immigration, security (where I had to skull my water bottle that I forgot to empty) then International Business Lounge.

Flight to LA was long, thankfully I got an upgrade to Premium Economy. I would have preferred business but you can’t have everything. The flight left an hour late (we were sitting on the plane for over half an hour after boarding. (Apparently there was some issue with animals we were transporting). This had me a little bit worried about my connection in LA but they said we had a good flight time. Food and service in Premium Economy was good (as with my past experience). Sleep this time wasn’t as good as last time though, I reckon I got about 2, hour blocks and then a longer block of maybe 2.5 hours – not a lot of sleep. (I did doze a little on the Perth to Sydney flight too). Maybe I should have got sleeping pills before I left. We did make pretty good time though, despite our late departure, we only landed about 10 minutes late.

When we landed, it turned out there was no need for stress as my flight to Chicago had been delayed. Immigration was slow, but not unbearably slow – it probably took an hour to get thought. I reckon within about 90 minutes of landing I was seated in the AA Flagship Lounge, thank to on Qantas Gold (Oneworld Sapphire status). It is a nice lounge and certainly a serious contender for (at least some of) my time at LAX before my flight home. The food at this lounge was especially high quality – the pesto fish was one of my favourites.

So eventually it came time to board the delayed flight. I think it was about an hour and a half late and the promised faster flight time didn’t eventuate so we landed at O’Hare just after 1am instead of the 11.30pm promised. By the time I got my bags, walked out the Hilton, checked in and got up to my room it was about 2.30am. As such it was after 3am before I got to sleep, which wasn’t a great start to getting acclimatised to US time – and generally just not enough sleep! That’s the travel leg, so I might leave this post here and pick up the next morning.

So I’m now back in Perth (for almost a week) but I’m still keen to try and record the trip and it was great fun, so with the help of my photos (which helpfully record the date and location) I’m going to try and record the best parts of the trip (at least that I remember).

Monday was day one of Sentosa. After breakfast we caught the MRT down to HarbourFront and purchased tickets for the cable car to Sentosa. One return ticket let you board the cable car once at each station. We first caught the cable car up to mount Fabre and then back down across to Sentosa. The cable cars weren’t as comfortable as I remember and they definitely weren’t as good as the Disney Skyliner. They didn’t have air conditioning either so they weren’t super comfortable. (All of our trip was hot & humid, but this day seemed especially that way). It probably also didn’t help that both Elise and I were feeling decidedly queasy and needed frequent trips to the toilet. We’re not sure exactly what it was that caused it but we both felt unwell for a period which didn’t make the day a whole lot of fun.

We went down to Fort Siloso and did the skywalk there, which gave a good view. There was also some interesting information about how Singapore was used as a defensive base. It would have been good to do more of it, but we didn’t really feel up to it and certainly none of the longer walks without easy access to a toilet! We then went to a Seven Eleven, partly to escape the humidity and have air conditioning for a while, but also to looks for drinks. They didn’t have Powerade of Gatorade, but we managed to find a Singaporean equivalent which helped to make Elise and I start feeling better. We then took a long loop on the Cable Car and then took the monorail down to the beach station where we had booked tickets to watch a night time light and water show.

We had about 3 hours to kill so we sat around, watched a water canon show accompanied by music which was good light 5 minute entertainment. Andrew and the kids ordered dinner and I had a lot of chips after finding they didn’t cause any further stomach issues. By this time we were both starting to feel a lot better. Wings of Time is a laser, light, projection water show that was fantastic. It foes for about 15 minutes and has a story line as well as looking fantastic. We jumped on the monorail as an easy way to get home and went to bed.

It almost the middle of Day 2 (or the third day of travel – at least when I’m starting this post. Edit: It’s now Friday, so I’m way behind but not giving up yet!) The flight was uneventful, I dozed a bit, food was fine. I was pretty tired so I didn’t make any really progress in getting things done or watching TV. I read a little bit of my book and listened to some music. We landed on schedule and it took a little while to get through immigration, but nothing too bad and our luggage was already on the carousel by the time we got out. We had organised a transfer to the hotel, but unfortunately they never showed up. We spend a fair but of time waiting but in the end we got frustrated and decided to just take a taxi. We then had the issue that there was 5 of us and Maxi’s can take a while to arrive. In the end we split into two taxis. They took two different routes to the hotel, but they arrived pretty close together and the fare was less than a dollar in difference.

The hotel is nice, without being amazing. It’s almost $250/night so it’s not cheap, but then again no accomodation in Singapore is. My experience so far is that Singapore is fairly expensive, probably more so than the US. Although, this trip is slightly different – travelling with friends I’m probably less likely to cut corners on cost. Anyway checked in with no issue. We were all pretty tired and had agreed on room service for dinner. I’m on level 9 and my friends are on level 25. My card won’t let me up to their floor so we met in the lobby and then headed up to their room for dinner. Then it was time for a bath & bed!

We agreed on a relaxed start for Sunday and met on floor 4 for breakfast. The hotel that we’re staying at includes a (buffet) breakfast which is pretty good. We then headed off to do the Flower Domes and Cloud Forest at Gardens by the Bay. They were great – it was cool to see indoor flowers. The biggest thing I noticed when we walked in was the lovely fragrant scent of them all. They were beautiful to look it, but I can’t write a lot about it – they were flowers! We had lunch athwart is probably a typical (Singaporean) fast foot joint. Then we saw the cloud forest, it was avatar themed which was a bit of fun and there was an amazing indoor waterfall.

After that it was on the MRT (Singapore public transport) back to the hotel. I must say Singapore public transport is great. You can scan on & off with your credit card, so no extra card needed. It also covers the whole city really well. (Though that’s probably easier when you consider Singapore is the size of Bunbury and there’s not a lot of urban sprawl).

Edit: Oops – I forgot the other thing we did until I started adding photos to this post. After the cloud forest it was actually the MRT down to the water where we had a bum boat tour booked. We organised that then ducked into a nearby bar cafe to have a cold drink and some cooler air and a break from the humidity. The boat tour was good, we got to go up and down the river and hear some history about the areas we were passing by. We also got to see the Merlion (which was good – more on that later) with some decent photos. After the boat tour we headed back to the hotel!

We decided to have the buffet dinner at the hotel. The food was good, but it wasn’t cheap. We also realised it was a halal hotel which meant no port at all and also no alcohol with dinner. 14,694 steps later and 10.33 km it was time for bed.

Here are some pictures from Day 1 – you can expand them to see the full photo by clicking on the image!