Grizzles London - Vancouver 23

There is no easy way of commuting across the world, just slow ways and faster ways.  For the time being we choose the faster way, burning as we go enough carbons to keep a small foreign country in fossil fuel for a decade, and we don't feel particularly good about that.  We don't feel particularly good about the food we eat en route, and we particularly don't feel terrific about the price of that food either.

Fortunately there are people employed by airlines to remind us that we shouldn't feel good about the way we travel either, so at least we don't have time to get too smug about our lot.  As Al so cheerily reminded us after we arrived tomorrow (work that out!), the motto of his national carrier is (apparently) "We're not happy until you're not happy."  They certainly gave some of the less caring souls working for an airline with a kangaroo on its tail a run for their money in the "most complaints lodged stakes."

Of course being given the only seat that had a non-functioning headphone jack for the entire twelve hour flight didn't do any more for my demeanour than did the three terribly unsatisfactory meals we ate in Airport Terminals did for our pockets.  By the time we were on the second leg, despite the improbability of the odds of finding another headphone jack not working, I came up trumps once more.

A friend who shared many business air miles with me over the years used to remind me that any flight we walked away from was a good one, and I must admit if we were to score our trip from London to Vancouver on that basis, it wasn't bad at all.   Although not only did we walk away from the flight, we almost found ourselves having to walk to our hotel, having not actually received any instructions as to the process of catching our connecting shuttle.

After eventually working things out and arriving at our uncharacteristically not at the bottom of the scale hotel, I might have settled in to catch up on a few blog posts sadly lagging in time, had the wifi facility not been indisposed.   Still, dinner was the perfect salve for our state of mind and jetlagged bodies, and we were in Canada, so things were not too shabby at all, and we needed to get ourselves in a grizzly mindset for the coming week!