Hey guys - good to be back; have to say Vancouver was interesting but nothing on Seattle... tough trip tho - 2 out of 8 days fully taken up with travel - ie a full 48 hrs!! due to connections via LA... word of warning: NEVER travel via LA as your transit point if you can help it - gotta be the worst airport in the world [perhaps excepting some place like Tallin, or the capital of Belorussia!]. Do you think the americans can work out that transiting through means that you don't need to leave the airport? No, so instead of taking a transit card and walking through some back corridor to your onward flight to Canada, you have to queue for 2 hours along with 2000 other poor souls who've also flown through the night, to go through the privilege of officially entering the US, just so you can emigrate again 2 hours later. But do you think that they can do even this efficiently? Well no. You see, we poor antipodeans arrive [after around 14 hrs of no sleep] at around 6.45 am and they don't start till 7.00am, or whenever the first shift of customs officials have had their bagels and crap coffee; so there's a queue of about 2 Km of poor tired, hungry people all waiting for the privilege of immigrating for 2 hours, only to emigrate again 2 hrs later... Gotta feel some sympathy for them in this post-Osama world [heightened threat of terrorist attacks, etc] but you'd think they could think of some smarter system; bottom line don't go through the US if you can help it! A 8)
