Thursday was a long day for me, thirty-seven hours from when I woke at 6 a.m. in Opua until midnight in Evanston, and I didn’t even try to go to sleep until an hour later.
What had once been forecast to be a washout was a perfect morning in Opua. The meteorologists had the sequence right, but not the timing or intensity, which is why I don’t put much credence in more than 48 hour forecasts.
Usually when I leave Opua I row in only once, taking a sliver of soap and some paper towels to dry off after I shower, but the early morning was sunny and windless, so I rowed in after my first cup of coffee, showered, and rowed back out to GANNET to finish my breakfast.
I rowed in again at 9:30 when light wind began to come up.
All the flights were on time and as painless as possible.
Los Angeles was sunny and the basin clear when we landed at 10:00 a.m., still Thursday, November 5, and when my next flight took off at 1 p.m.
I always book an aisle seat, but as you can see from the photo above, somehow ended up with a window.
The plane took off to the west, turned south in a long curve, flying over Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor, which like Cape Town’s, is only an all weather port because of breakwaters.
I lived down there a block from the beach near the right edge of the photo in 1963-64.
I didn’t sleep much between Auckland and Los Angeles, but did fall asleep on the way to Chicago, waking after a couple of hours to look down on snow covered fields.
It was dusk as we neared Chicago at only 4 p.m. and shockingly dark before the taxi dropped me at the condo at 5.
Carol was not yet home from work.
I showered, changed clothes, and made myself what Dave correctly pointed out after my last post is a martinus.
You may recall the joke:
Legionnaire goes into a Roman bar and says: I want a martinus.
Barman: You mean a martini.
Legionnaire: If I had wanted two, I’d have asked for them.
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The GUARDIAN has run two excellent articles recently, one about the U.S. Presidential race, which is intended to be humorous, and is, but is also tragically accurate.
