Travelling is always an adventure!!! We were off on one of the longest journeys we had ever taken...to Australia via Fiji! We had a bit of an inauspicious start when we went to leave the house, only to find the wind had blown open the door during a nasty storm, and had dumped drifts of snow into the mudroom, covering all the boots, gloves, coats...We had to shovel to see the carpet, and pulled all the snow-covered articles into the house to melt and dry...then we were off to the airport, and a snowless destination! The flight to Detroit was delayed by the storm, but after almost an hour of waiting and de-icing, we were above the clouds and away! “Fortunately”, the storm only as far west as Detroit, so the flight there was also delayed a bit, allowing us to get on board!!! The Detroit airport has wonderful underground passageways, and we took a moving sidewalk through the coolest tunnel, softly lit and full of wall paintings, to the departure concourse. We took off and turned back our watches 3 hours, peering through the windows at landscapes where we could see concentric circles cut into the fields; then at flat-topped mesas and snow capped mountains across the western portion of the U.S.. Los Angeles sprawls on for miles, with lots of flattopped buildings to the east and canals, seemingly leading nowhere. There were huddles of tall buildings and flat ponds rimmed by dykes. It’s interesting to get
impressions of a place from so high above! Finally, we could see the Pacific just before landing at “LAX”. There was quite a wait before boarding which turned out to be a good thing, because we had to trek back and forth from Terminal 2 to the International Terminal twice in order to get tickets to insure our luggage would meet us in Fiji (It never did!) During the layover we passed the time with airport games (which we invent as we go along). Shoes were pretty boring to critique in that airport, but noses and jeans became very funny the more we focused on them ...perhaps we were a little punchy after travelling for 15 1/2 hours, with miles yet to go before we landed! We took off and set our watches back another 4 hours and tried to get a little sleep during the almost 11 hour flight to Nadi, the capital of Fiji. Ahh! Fiji, country of 322 islands! We checked into our hotel and almost immediately commandeered a taxi, driven by Shere Khan (seriously, that was his name!). I mentioned earlier that our luggage did not disembark with us in Nadi, so we were off to pick up a few things, and then get the grand tour from our driver.”Senga na lenga”...the Fijian expression for “No worries”, was a great state of mind to adopt! We toured the city a bit, with a stop at an amazing village in the middle of town, complete with Indian temples, built by the local Hindus. We passed through Natalua Village and on to the Sleeping Giant Mountain, where Raymond Burr originally lived and created his magnificent Orchid Gardens, maintained to this day. The trails were slippery with the humidity; there were so
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September 2009
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