Life, The Universe & Everything

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!

So I wasn’t wildly successful in finishing off writing about my US Trip. It’s probably too late now, but I did take some notes so maybe I’ll do an abbreviated version of the highlights at some point. At any rate I’m off again on another trip (i’m not counting the two 48 hour or less work trips to Melbourne).

This one is to Singapore, with my friends and their two daughters and it’s purely a holiday. We’re there for 8 days so it should be a great time. I’m not going to make any promises, but I am going to try and blog about it. We’ve just taken off and we have WiFi for the first our of so while we’re still in range of the Satellite that covers Australia.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Singapore. We went for Mom’s 50th when I was 11 but I only have a few memories of that trip. I also spend two days there in 2005 on our way back from the FPS US Trip but we were so shattered after all of that travel that I don’t think we did that much. So I’m excited to experience it again as an adult, it should be good fun.

Qantas Club pays off again – flying international lets you into the Perth International Business Lounge which was a nice place to spend the 2+ hours before our flight. It was a good time to be there too. With no other scheduled international flights this morning the lounge was pretty empty which is always nice when there’s less crowds. Being the international lounge, we even managed a sneaky glass or two of champagne for breakfast. The coffee wasn’t great, but other than that it was a good experience.

Well that’s all for now, stay tuned for Singapore adventures.

OK, so I officially sucked at documenting the travels. I’m again on a plane in business class, but this is also a month after I started this post. As an aside, I’ve really got to stop upgrading to business class – I’m getting used to flying this way and it sucks when I don’t! Anyway, let’s see how much I can recall of my trip (with the help of hastily scribbled notes and credit card statements).

As I mentioned at the start of the last post, it was an early start on Monday but I didn’t have any issues. I’m glad I paid the small fee for priority on AA, especially since these flights were my basic economy fares. Unfortunately, Hartford was the one airport that didn’t have an AA (or any one world) lounge so I had to spend the time waiting for my flight in the standard lounge area – isn’t life tough!

I’m struggling to remember, which is why writing this so late is bad, but I think the flights were uneventful. Read whatever I wrote about my last AA flight – I’m sure it was pretty much the same. However, I would like to reiterate that flight across the US seem to have a lot more turbulence than in Australia. (Though given the flight I’m currently on, I’m starting to reconsider that statement). We changed planes in Miami and when I boarded (as one of the first thanks to priority) I was slightly concerned. Though nobody else seemed to worries about the smoke that seemed to be coming from the ceiling… Turns out it wasn’t smoke – have a look at this article (https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/forecasts/what-is-this-weird-thick-fog-filling-airplane-cabin-before-take-off) for a description of the phenomenon, but it was certainly something unusual that I hadn’t seen before. Despite all that we made it safely to Orlando. (and yes I forgot to mention it, but there was a brief stop in the Admiral’s club at Miami airport. This one was middle of the road as they go. Had decent stuff, but not Chicago level!)

At Orlando, after a significantly long wait, I picked up my car at Orlando. This time, it was. Mitsubishi Rouge – it still amazes me that this is a so called ‘compact’ car, but I did love the car more on that later. But here’s a picture of it to finish off this post.