Back in Europe: daily updates (I hope)!

Hello anyone out there.

I figure it's time I attempted a daily blog to keep any interested parties up to date with what's going on during this extended buying trip in Europe.

Friday, March 12, 2010:

My usual chaotic preparation for a trip overseas. I'm always a fairly good chance of missing flights because I attempt to do so much before I fly. This day was no exception. I had a 9am appointment with a dermatologist because of an inflamed mole on my lower back that had been bothering me, and with two previous skin cancer incidents I had decided to play it safe. The doctor felt that the two moles I referred her to were fine but she removed them both anyway and they will be tested for nasties.

I went home and packed and worked through a list of jobs, primarily being frustrated by TomTom ... I'd almost missed flights 18 months earlier after stuffing around trying to download maps of France and Germany to my mobile phone, and this time my GPS was giving me just as much grief. The maps I had bought for my unit at $180 downloaded to my computer but wouldn't fit on the GPS. I got a snotty support guy at TomTom who eventually hung up on me and went to lunch. The next guy was much better but I eventually had to give up on making it work. Instead I had deleted everything off the unit and was going to try to figure it out on the plane.

I had intended to catch a cab at 2pm so I could beat the driver changeover and be at the airport in plenty of time for a 5.40pm flight. Too easy, so instead I drove around town to do three jobs: I left home at 1.45pm and booked the cab for 3pm, then set off to drop off two bottles of chablis at the warehouse to add to an order and one bottle of champagne to be posted to a restaurant that is looking for 50 cases. Then I drove to News Limited to leave three bottles to be photographed for an article James Halliday is writing on Schloss Lieser for The Australian weekend magazine. The final task was to get 2kg of Campos Superior coffee beans from Newtown for a mate in Burgundy. I pushed the cab booking to 3.15pm and then 3.30pm as I raced home.

Scrapping plans to have another shower, I quickly changed, grabbed all my things and headed outside. The cab turned up almost on time and although it took longer than I would have liked, by checking in the night before I only had to arrive 60 minutes early to check in bags.

Qantas were unmoved by a letter from my doctor asking me to be given a more comfortable seat (that would have been business!) so I settled in at the back of the plane on a new A380. New but not reliable apparently as it had "engineering" issues and we left about an hour late. My connection time in Singapore was only one hour for th flight to Paris and I was given conflicting information about whether that flight would be held.

Despite the constant farting of the old man in the aisle seat, or maybe because of it, I slept a couple of hours and caught up on a couple of movies. There was no hope of making a quick getaway because although the crew offered to take me upstairs through business, the old farter didn't want to let me out.

Ground staff told me the flight was going to be held for 70 minutes but then when I checked at the transfer desk they told me it had already left. They were going to put me back on the 380 for London, with a connection to Paris and an arrival time about five and a half hours later than planned.

I changed clothes, got back on the plane and this time had 13 or so hours to look forward to sandwiched between two big guys -- one a nice British businessman based in Hungary, and the other a giant Mormon who smelled bad, slept with his mouth open and also turned out to be a chronic farter. Why do people do this in enclosed places? Can't they go to the bathroom and spare the rest of us the nasal torture?

Still, I slept for a few hours, watched a couple more movies and made it to London and my new connection. Also, on about the fifth attempt, I got the TomTom map to fit on the GPS. I then went in and deleted a bunch of voice files (as instructed) to free up more memory, and then tried to add one voice. It wouldn't work until I emptied the trash, but even after downloading the voice the unit said it didn't have any matched to the maps and I would be guided by arrows instead of voice commands.

Still, I thought I could live with that -- at least I had the maps. Let's call that the end of the first day and the end of a ridiculously long post. I'm not going to be able to do this much every day!