September 29, 2010

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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