Volume 5: Pete in the USA Part 1. A young balding mans journey through 20 something states and back
Day 1 – Melbourne to LA to Anaheim
Expectation is a burden too great for reality to carry. That is how I’d describe the US tour. After coming off the greatest month of my life in Europe just a month earlier I had now become greedy and expected the same would happen in the month of July. I had gone to Europe with no expectations whatsoever, and even if I did they would have been blown away. The US tour, however, was the complete opposite. I was travelling with Gav on this tour and we had hyped this tour up to extremes before hand. We had made promotional posters, calendars and mp3’s in expectation that this was going to be the wildest month of all time. To quote a great man, myself, “Expectation is a burden too great for reality to carry”.
As we drove to the airport there was quite a bit of fog about. My dad quipped that there would be a chance of flights being delayed. As it turned out the old man was right and our flight was delayed 2 hours and 25 minutes. Or in my terms, it was a 3 beer delay. Which is something the airlines should seriously consider putting on their departure time displays, something like “YOUR PLANE HAS BEEN DELAYED 3 BEERS”. Think about it, it’s a lot more positive than saying your plane has been delayed by over 2 hours. Instead of having angry customers mingling round the departure gate bitching on about “bloody airlines being bloody late” you have a congregation of happy customers saying “You beauty, no need to rush, I’ve got a chance to have a few beers”. If only I had suggested that to the bloke at the Singapore airport when I had a chance. Why is it all the great ideas come to you too late?
As Gav knew a woman that worked at Qantas she had set us up with seats that had ample legroom. They were positioned just behind the business class section, which to my delight is apparently the non-crying baby section part of the plane. The only real problem with the seats was that due to the fact business class was completely devoid of customers it made it hard to find a “sex before the plane crashes girl”. The woman seated next to us (in her early 50’s so not a candidate) had one of those “Ausmerican” accents; the accent an aussie gets when they spend an extended period of time in America which leads to a merge with their aussie accent and an American accent. The Australian people are a warm, welcoming people, which apparently extends to us accepting other peoples accents as well. I knew of a woman at work who spent all of 3 months in Ireland and came back with an Irish accent. It doesn’t seem to happen with other countries. You get talking to anyone from Scotland and you ask them how long they’ve been in the country because their accent is so strong you think they must be on holiday in Australia. So many times, the answer will come back “I’ve been here over 20 years, Jimmy”.
For the duration of the flight I had some annoying little snot I soon dubbed Harry Potter (due to his glasses, not lightning bolt tattoo on his forehead) behind me consistently slamming his feet into the back of my chair. It was the only time in my history of flying that I wasn’t concerned about reclining my chair and crushing the legs of the person behind me. That coupled with the fact that this particular design of aircraft meant that whenever anyone within 5 rows of you turned on the overhead light it came across as a spotlight aimed at your forehead made it somewhat difficult to sleep. Of course, Harry Potter had to be someone who liked to read during the night when the cabin was blacked out so you could sleep, so he would put his overhead spotlight on and off a number of times during the flight just to make sure I never drifted off into anything that resembled a deep sleep.
The smell of airline food was still successful in making me feel sick so I passed on dinner that night. How do they get it to smell like an old wet boot that’s spent 30 minutes in a microwave? Sometime while I had managed to get to sleep I missed out on the passing out of the ice creams. When I woke up the airline stewardess, who was female so must’ve naturally been attracted to me and my deceptively huge upper body, nicely asked me “Would you like an ice cream sweetie?”. Having never been called sweetie before, I was somewhat startled, yet ecstatic, and the fact she didn’t offer Gav an ice cream or call him sweetie made the moment all the more special. While I would never get called sweetie again over the next month, I did get called “love” at least twice by complete strangers, so I must’ve been omitting some sort of “sweetie/love” energy.
Off the plane we were through customs relatively quickly (no doubt from assistance from my “sweetie/love” energy) and onto a shuttle bus to our hotel. On the bus we got talking to an American who was in town for some sort of convention which I assumed was a work convention (read junket) given he didn’t tell us what sort of convention it was. As it turned out it was a Japanese animation convention, which made me thankful I hadn’t made any smart comments about the many dressed up freaks/nerds heading towards the convention we had seen walking the streets as it may have offended him.
On the to way the hotel I noticed that LA drivers considered it optional to use their indicators when changing lanes, and it appeared mandatory to tailgate the car in front of you. Which wasn’t the safest thing given every second car was as big as a small house. It’s a small hint that you’ve started making cars too big when you replace the glove box with a wardrobe, which given the size of some of the cars I’m sure they’d done that.
We finally reached the hotel after about an hour and as soon as we told the check in staff we were on a Contiki tour they told us where the bar was without any prompting from us. They also suggested some activities we might want to do the next day as we had nothing planned. Gav seemed enamoured by the Universal Studios tour and with little consultation from me had us booked to go there the next day. Given I was so tired, hungry and felt so flat from the flight, I probably would have consented to them taking my liver in exchange for a shower and something to eat. Gav had next to no money on him so I foolishly offered to pay for him to which he informed me he would get me the money at the next possible chance. Thankfully, I wasn’t particular fond of that money as I didn’t get to see it for another 2 weeks. We dropped our luggage off in the hotel room and went and enjoyed a meal from one of the local restaurants, McDonalds. From there we did the mandatory tour thing and purchased a slab of beer. I captured my first beer on American soil on film and had a small, quiet time to myself to appreciate the moment.
Back at the hotel room I spent a solid 5 minutes trying to figure out how to use the shower tap in the hotel. I turned it left, no water. I turned it right, no water. Eventually Gav called reception who informed him you had to pull it out to get water. I had been to 15 countries before hand, and not a single one of them had a shower tap you had to pull out to get water. You go to that many countries and you get a good confidence in your ability to get water from a tap, then something like that happens and it just shatters your confidence in your ability to operate simple domestic appliances. As my brain now appeared to be operating so poorly that it couldn’t even work a tap, I put it to rest for a number of hours.
When Gav and I both awoke, it was night time. For dinner that night we had some barley and hops, in liquid form, from the bar. To the best of my recollection we each had about 6 servings of this delightful meal. At the bar we talked with the enlightened locals, including an in-depth discussion about foreign policy with a guy from Mississippi who had never been out of the US. When you’re in a foreign land you don’t like to insult the locals, well not to their face anyway, so I refrained from the telling him that I thought his president was possibly the stupidest head of state in the history of this planet that wouldn’t even know how to operate a simple shower tap and that it scared the shit out of me that someone that stupid had the most powerful army in the world at his disposal which he had just used to illegally invade Iraq. After listening to the barmen bag the Angels for losing to the lowly placed Texas, we decided to head back to the room for a long sleep.
Day 2 – Anaheim
Today we were up early to head off to Universal Studios. It was an interesting journey in the minibus that took us there. The driver and the LA residence reconfirmed that tailgating is mandatory and the fact that the bus seemed to have a flat rear tyre made for a bumpy and dangerous journey. The driver also seemed to be superstitious as he would inexplicitly stop at every railway crossing for no reason. After the third or fourth time he did it I was incredibly tempted to inform him that if those big red lights at the crossings started flashing then that would have been a fair indication that you needed to stop, but until then drive through with full confidence you’re not about to be slammed into by the 9:05 to Anaheim. If that wasn’t annoying enough, he also had some weird stop start driving technique in which he would brake for no reason then accelerate. Sure, it’s a sign of good driver that can anticipate an accident and slow down to avoid it, but the way he was driving it was like he was expecting an accident every 30 seconds.
Anyway, we made it to Universal Studios alive, whilst also catching a glimpse of the Hollywood sign on the way. Once there, the driver gave us some tips on how to smuggle food into the theme park to avoid paying the inflated prices once inside the park, which left me with only 1 thought: this bus driver used to be a drug courier.
Inside the park we headed straight for the Jurassic Park ride which now brought my total of different flume/log rides I’d ridden to 49. We checked out the “Back draft” show which I’m sure was quite impressive, in the 80’s, but had now somewhat dated. It was down at the Jurassic Park ride where we purchased our first beers for the day and it was down there that Gav would knock over my first beer of the day when I placed it on the ground to take a photo. It was something that has been becoming an all too common event with Gav, as I still remember the time he knocked my beer over one night at the Moonee Valley racecourse, about 3 years ago. Sometime during the day we decided to take the famous Universal Studios tour. What amazed me most about the tour was not seeing King Kong or Jaws but the fact that the chick giving the tour remained incredibly perky and upbeat even though you just knew she was going to be giving the same spiel around 20 to 30 times that day. There was a similar perky chick at the Terminator 2 3D show, which left me thinking they had a great work ethic and were really determined to do a professional job or they’d done a few lines of cocaine earlier in the day to help them get through what must be like ground hog day for them. Either way, they were doing a great job.
Late in the afternoon, and a little weary from all the walking we’d done in the heat, we sat down and enjoyed a beer at an “Irish Pub”. Well, if serving just one Irish beer on tap (I’m tipping you can guess which one) compared with two American beers on tap makes you an authentic Irish Pub then this was indeed an Irish Pub. Who am I to argue? I’ve never been to Ireland. As we sat outside enjoying our traditionally Irish brewed Budweiser’s I was amazed by the array of fat bastards getting around on motorised wheelchairs and needing oxygen to help them function. I was told America was a country of fat bastards, but I couldn’t believe just how many people I was seeing that were “stocking up for the winter”.
After a long day it was back on the bus. I was keen to get back by 8:30pm so we could enjoy some pre tour drinks with our new tour mates, but that 8:30pm event became something that would not happen as we got stuck in the traffic that had gone to see the 4th of July Fireworks at Disneyland. As I watched the news the next day it seemed some people had got a little over zealous in their fireworks celebrations and at least 6 houses were burnt down on that Independence Day in California.
When we got back to the hotel we checked the bar to see if anyone was there from tour. As there was no one there, we went back to our room and finished off the last of the Coronas. When they were all gone we went back to the bar in hope that we would find tour mates, and at least, to continue that stimulating foreign policy discussion with the bloke from Mississippi. One of the great examples of foreign policy going wrong is the American sales tax system in which you only find out how much tax you’ve got to pay on an item when you get to the register. Apparently that’s a legacy carried over from the English ripping them off over some purchase of a few teabags a few hundred years earlier. It’s great when you go to purchase something you believe is $5 only to get to the register and discover it’s actually $5.29. Of course, everyone wants to be tipped so if you paid with a $100 bill you’d get $94 back, all in $1 bills, with 71 cents of poo money.
Eventually some people from our tour surfaced at the bar and gave me a chance to do an early scouting report. Gav and I were disappointed that a bloke calling himself “Big Sam” was not present. We had had email correspondence with Big Sam before the tour and he told us he was an Englishmen who would drink us Aussies under the table. As it turned out, his room mate (a bloke named Aaron who could never appear on “Queer eye for a straight guy” as the straight guy from my early impressions) was at the pub and informed us Big Sam was back in the room sleeping. We thought that was quite poor form for a man threatening to drink us under the table so sometime after midnight Aaron let us into his room and we promptly introduced ourselves to the big man. He was a little startled and in his half awake state was thinking something along the lines of what the f*#!s going on here? He was pretty cool about the whole thing and I think he was almost relieved that there would be drunken rowdy idiots on tour he could drink with.
We thanked him for his time, and after that we went and waited at a bus stop for some other chicks that had apparently gone to McDonalds. Sometime about 3am they arrived and we introduced ourselves. After exchanging pleasantries for an hour we said goodbye and crashed into our respective beds.
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