Day 8: Home Again, Home Again
Thursday, November 4, 1999 		 

Woke up around 5am to see Paul off (he had to go and help a friend with a TV commercial shoot at 6). I went back to sleep for a while and then got up to shower and pack. Fortunately my suitcase expands by a few inches, otherwise I would have needed to leave some things behind! (My suitcase went from 26 kilos leaving SF, to 29 kilos leaving Perth, to 32 kilos leaving Sydney!)

A quick breakfast, and then a cab ride to the airport. The flight was right on time leaving, and the gate agent was really nice and switched me to a block of three seats to myself (the flight was only about a quarter full).

Note: For anyone who hasn't been on one recently, the 747 is really an incredible feat of engineering. The sheer size of the thing is staggering. I was in row 52, with 10 more rows behind me. Absolutely massive, it's amazing it gets off the ground. And on top of that, it can fly for 14 hours nonstop.


My chariot back home. It's so much bigger in person.

City Comparisons

Whenever I visit a city, I end up trying to figure out what city I've seen before that it most feels like. Here's my current list of cities that feel similar in some ways to me:

Sydney, London, Boston.
Perth, San Diego.
Paris, New York.
Munich, San Francisco.
Amsterdam... unique.

It's really wild that after only a few minutes of flight there's nothing but the Pacific Ocean to be seen for over twelve hours. Australia really is a long way away. Once again on the flight home, the tranquilizers from my brother let me get 9 hours of sleep, gotta love modern medicine!

My time in Sydney was definitely too short to get a real feel for the city. Plus I didn't have the large group of people to make things as warm and special as Perth. Maybe I'll need to take a business trip there sometime next year and I can stay on for a long weekend to really see the city properly...


Nothing but the Pacific for a while now.

To JP, Matthew, James and all of the friends that I had such a good time with in Perth, I thank you all very much. You really made me feel welcome and I'll always have special memories of Perth because of it. I really hope to see some (or all!) of you sometime in the future, either back in Perth, or in the States.

This trip seemed to go by really quickly, more so than my trip to Europe in early October. Even so, I feel very relaxed and clear headed, ready to dive back into work back in California, full steam ahead. I guess that's what vacations are for, no?

I hope everyone that followed along during the trip enjoyed it, building a little website during a trip is really the modern version of a journal that you can share with friends as it's happening, and any time after that. I like it!

Well, no more major vacations for this year (and probably most of the Winter), but come spring time, look out!
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