After a good nights sleep (some slept more than others) we had breakfast at the Novotel at Heathrow just before they closed the buffet at 10am local, 11am Oslo time. The kids slept from 1 am until 9:15am UK time. We had managed to adjust half the time difference before boarding in London. Not bad.

The big attraction at breakfast was the the toasting machine with a conveyor belt

After breakfast Hélène and I spent some time reading email and paying some bills we didn’t get time to pay before leaving. To my horror I realized that I had forgotten to bring one of our bank-ID security devices. M*rde! I quickly called my sister to ask her if she could fedex it to us in the states. She laughed and reminded me that she was on vacation in Spain. Grumble, you can’t argue with that excuse. I finally managed to get hold of my niece who heads over to our place.

In the meantime Hélène discovered an email from the city of Oslo concerning the building permit of our garage. Something was wrong with a drawing so they refused to accept our application for changing the originally accepted application. The drawings that need to be redone were in our office at home. I get hold of my niece again and she was able to kill two birds with one stone by picking up the device and the drawings.

We got so occupied with fixing things that we went over the time we had decided to leave the hotel to go back to terminal 5. As is quite common for us we ended up eating up our entire planned time margin and then some. The shuttle from the hotel was very slow stopping at every hotel you can imagine, Tension rises, but we manage to check in in time, stressed but with high spirits.

OK, Marius, here is the next plane. A classic, a Boeing 747-400:

The kids were fantastic during the entire flight. The three of them got seats next to each other while Hélène and I sat in the row in front of them.

They basically tended to themselves during the entire 10 hour flight! We didn’t even have to follow Iseline to the bathroom, just help her get out into the aisle. The kids loved the British Airways entertainment system and also had fun with their iPod touches. They managed to stay awake during the entire flight. Frankly, it couldn’t have gone better. No crying, no arguing, no loud noises, no vomiting, no fights. Just peace, harmony and smiles. This is very promising for the rest of the trip.

i knew that Adrian was good in English (his school came in 2nd place of all schools in Oslo during national testing of English proficiency 2 years ago), but I hadn’t realized just how good. He handled all interaction with the flight attendants like it was his mother tongue.

I have made a point of telling the kids from very early on that it is extremely important to learn English. It’s a risky strategy, I know. Sometimes a kid will do the opposite of what you want if you try to drive a point through too hard. I have told the kids  that English is the key to the world (sorry France) and that dad never could have done many of the things he has done at work and met many of the people he knows around the world if he hadn’t been good at English. I’m not going to take the credit for all the hard work Adrian and his teachers have put down, but it does warm a father’s heart and make me proud when I hear Adrian speak English.

Adrian was also helping his siblings all the time and making sure they were fine. He did a great job. Kudos to the big brother!

Once we arrived in San Francisco

Iseline started to get a little tired and grumpy. Luckily it often doesn’t take much to turn her around again. The pole inside the shuttle train to the rental car area did the trick. This young lady has just flown for over 10 hours and it’s 2am in her home time zone:

We got our car, stopped to get some groceries and found the house we had rented in Menlo Park without a problem. I had bought a Tom Tom iPhone car kit before leaving and we put it to the test for the first time. I had chosen Navigon as the GPS-application on the iPhone. For some strange reason they have decided to try to pronounce place names in the style of the language you have chosen.  My phone is set to French and we all got a good laugh when the program told us to drive in the direction of “Sehn Frenseusio” Apart from that it worked like a charm. Yet another part of my grand master plan for travel gadgets worked out.

The house we are renting is fantastic. I’m now sitting in a large living room in a beautiful house instead of in a miniscule hotel room at twice the price. The best thing is that there is a large swimming pool in the garden. We are going to enjoy staying here.

Eirik

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P.S. The title of this entry comes from an almost forgotten ingenious Norwegian comedy/music group called “Prima Vera”. On one of their great albums (called “Ha ha he he ho! (De gærne har’e godt)” ) their rendtion of “I left my heart in San Francisco” is introduced with: “Johnny Pacemaker will never do this mistake again”. The song is quite short. After singing the opening line which is identical to the name of the song you can hear Johnny groan in pain before he falls to the floor. Go here, scroll down to the song and press the little play button.

Later in the album “Johnny Pacemaker makes the same mistake again” with his interpretation of “My heart goes boom bang a bang”. You can hear it on the same page above.

So, we finally managed to get ready and not annoy the taxi driver too much by only being 5 minutes late.

After 5 minutes in the taxi Hélène reminds me that I had forgotten to bring all the stuff I had wanted to take over to my good friend Hal in the states. Catastrophe! I had brought lots of homemade goodies from our summer house in France only so I could give it to Hal! 4 different types of walnut wine, plum and apricot jam, etc. etc. I was very close to committing ritual suicide by overeating on chocolate mousse.

How insanely frustrating. The stuff was 5 minutes away by car and there was no way I could get to it in the next 7 months. That feeling of “sh*t, how could I forget that” stayed with me for the rest of the day. At least 5 times I thought I had forgotten something else incredibly important only to remember I hadn’t.

Here we are at the airport:

And this one is for you, Marius, my nephew and airplaneaholic:

Crappy photo, but it is an Airbus A319.

After an uneventful flight (those are normally the best ones) we landed at Heathrow terminal 5:

got our lugage and grabbed a cab for our hotel, the Novotel at Heathrow.

Now for this round-the-world trip I have taken total responsibility for all bookings. I’ve done the hotels, the flights, the cars, the cattle rent, you name it. She hasn’t expressed it, but I suspect that this has been difficult for Hélène. She likes to have control and be on top of things. With the massive volume of bookings I have done she has given up following everything. I have sensed the pressure and I have come to take a certain pride in organizing all this and making sure everything is as good as possible

This was just to give you the backdrop for my feelings when I tried to book us in at the hotel. After intense typing on the computer the receptionist calls for another one. Then they call for their boss. The boss uses 2 seconds to look at the screen and exclaims: “That”s no wonder. This booking is for next month!” Oh, the humiliation! I had booked us in on October 29 instead of September 29. On top of this the hotel was almost full and they didn’t know if they could find us anything. Hélène sensed that something was wrong and came up to the reception desk. She was very diplomatic, but I did not exactly gain any bonus trust points.

I had done a non-refundable booking, but they were very friendly and spent about half an hour to extract the value of my booking to go against the walk-in rate and they did manage to lodge us, although with 2 rooms on 2 different floors. Kudos to Novotel.

Finally we could settle in. I shared a room with Adrian and Iseline. Adrian took a shower and we had some pringles and chocolate for dinner (don’t tell Hélène) before the kids went to bed.

I was in no mood for sleeping and wanted to adjust to Pacific time anyway. My wife was on a different floor, so the only solution was to cuddle up on the bathroom floor with my beloved Macbook Air and share this first day of our voyage with you guys.

Oh, I also need to tell you about my charging setup. WIth our 3 iPads, 2 Macbooks, 3 iPod touches, 2 Canon cameras and 2 iPhones I have spent some time finding a good charging station solution. I decided to use only european sockets and to use one point with an adapter. I then do a 2-way splitter connected to 2 very light weight 4-way extenders. Presto, 8 sockets from one in a very compact setup usable all over the world. I also have a mains to USB charger with 4 USB outputs.This gives me 3 iPad and 4 iPod/iPhone charge points from one of the extenders, leaving 4 socket points for other uses in the other extender. This is how Chuck Norris also charges his gadgets. Take a look:

It’s getting close to 4am Oslo time now (7pm Pacific). I guess I should go to bed.now. Thanks for holding out if you have read this far. See you around.

Eirik

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That title sounds like a country song. Oh well, here I am, sitting on the floor in darkness only lit up by the glow of the screen. I’m in a small bathroom in a hotel. Let’s backtrack before I explain why I am here.

As Hélène wrote it was an incredibly hectic last day at home. I think Adrian summed it up pretty well in a posting he did to Facebook 15 minutes before the taxi came to pick us up. He wrote: “Mom is stressing so much that I can’t even ask her if she has brought any books for me. Dad is desperately trying to print out the last travel documents so we can enter the United States. I’m just sitting here playing games on my iPod and really looking forward to the trip. Next stop London. I’m going to miss you all.”

We took the last dose of the drinkable Cholera vaccine a couple of hours before we left. The potion is certainly good for us but the taste leaves something to be desired. We all emptied our glasses very quiickly

… except Iseline …

She tasted a few milliliters and then completely refused to drink any more. We tried the carrot first. Hélène promised her a piece of chocolate if she drank her dose. This made her put the glass to her lips and then get even more determined to not drink it. Then i switched to the stick. Bad move. Iseline isn’t easily persuaded to do anything when she is under parental pressure, and I should have known. I was just too stressed with everything I had to do before leaving to think clearly. The stalemate continued for a long 10 minutes. I refused to let her leave the table until she had emptied the glass. She started screaming and crying with tears running fast.

OK. Time to admit that I wasn’t being a good parent and change tactics. I sat down with her and explained that it was for her well being that I wanted her to drink. If she didn’t she could get sick and that would be much worse than the bad taste. I went on for a while and tension fell. The last psychological barrier was my presence. She kindly asked me to leave and so I did. I went over to the other side of the living room and looked at her from a distance. She saw the humor in the situation and started smiling. 2 minutes later she had drunk it all. Good girl!

To be continued…

We had a VERY busy last day at home, the tension was high and nothing looked ready. We worked until the last minute and we did it! We finally got ready for departure. The taxi was waiting outside while we were checking around the house and finishing to pack our bags. Believe it or not, we were actually early at the airport, at least according to our standards…

We are not used to traveling so light. Our luggage didn’t weigh more than 10-15 kg each. We usually wait in suspense to see if the scale passes 20 kg or not.

The day was also quite full of emotions for everybody, especially Iseline and Viktor. They had to say farewell several times to the same friends, one more hug, and just one more… Iseline joined her class for the class photo, even though she didn’t attend school today.

We are now on our way to London, where we’ll sleep at a Heathrow hotel. Everyone is trying to relax after all the preparation work, and to imagine what lies in front of us. We haven’t quite realized yet…

Tomorrow flight to San Francisco leaves at 13.55. We’ll have time to sleep in the morning

Hélène

It’s hard to believe that we are leaving in about 19 hours.

It’s 11:30pm now and everyone is still up. There is a 9 hour time difference with San Francisco and we started shifting our day already yesterday. The kids think it’s cool that they are not allowed to go to bed before midnight.

Everyone is a bit stressed and in a slightly irritated mood right now. Héléne and I are exhausted, there have been so many things to finish these last days. The kids said good-bye at school today and I think they only now have fully realized that they will not see their friends for 7 months.

The boys are making time pass by playing computer games. They’re getting sleepy now:

I’m going to stay up way late and finish scanning of the last books. What a chore that has been. I must be getting close to 5000 pages scanned now.

We got an email from our host on Easter Island two days ago. He told us that they are going to repair a runway on the airport and cut the flights to Papeete from two a week to one a week. Our flight will be cancelled! I had to scramble and redo our travel plans. The change was difficult since many flights are full for the holiday season. I managed to find a solution though. We are going to have to drop Puerto Montt and also have to leave Villa la Angostura two days earlier. And to get from Bariloche to Santiago we need to go through Buenos Aires (what a detour!).

Now for the good part. Suddenly we have 4 full more days in French Polynesia! I quickly went into travel agent mode and plowed through parts of the Lonely Planet guide for Tahiti. I bargained with Hélène to cut 3 days in Hiva Oa and presto, a full week on Tikehau, an atoll in Polyenesia:

It was not possible to change our round-the-world ticket online. It  cost me 1 1/2 hours on the phone getting hold of British Airways and then changing the ticket. I spent 20 minutes waiting. Then a nice voice asked me how she could help me. I explained and she said “one moment” and put me on hold. Five minutes later the line went dead. Swear at BA in Norwegian. Repeat 3 times. The last time I yelled “Please don’t put me on hold. Pretty, pretty, please!” before the person on the other end could take even a small breath. When she understood what I wanted she gave up and said an expert would call me back. At least someone did. Then we went through the pain of doing 4 flight changes over the phone. Man how much easier it is to just type them in at a web site.

This is not very promising. I can imagine what it will be like having to call BA on a flakey line from some remote location.

Other than that everyone is really excited to get going. What an adventure this is going to be!

Eirik

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