Two worlds collide!

God, customs lines are long and boring and smelly, well, maybe not so smelly, my irritation derives from a lack of sleep and my obvious frustration at temporarily being kept apart from my one true love Jules, Wait a minute I'm not meeting Jules, I'm meeting Vince, what the hell happenend there. It's a trip to Sydney for Vince's birthday, pull it together, this lack of sleep is affecting me worse than I thought. God, who would have anticipated that to get a cheap(ish) flight to Sydney , you would have to leave in the middle of the bloody night, I mean cummmmoooon!
If nothing else sitting on planes allows you a little time to think about things, and it was somewhere around half way over the Tasman that it set in, we have been travelling for now seven months or so, and throughout that time I hadn't seen Vince until this now fast approaching point. Some would argue of course that this in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not one of those people. Although time has passed so quickly and we've packed in quite a lot over the months, it's never nice not spending time with those you like, and that has certainly been the case. So given this duration and perhaps *more importantly a chance to break the routine of work, I find myself quite excited about the forthcoming meeting of minds and beards.
Sydney of course holds bitter sweet memories for me, as, if you remember, this was the real first port of call on this travelling extraviganza but also the place where I came down with a bout of food poisoning and resulting cold sore, which at least temporarily cast a little grey cloud over proceedings, for christ sake! We didn't even make it to Home and Away beach, well, that was certainly going to be put right on this attempt at Sydney. On a side point we've become completely addicted to H&W, not sure if this is because NZ TV is so utterly appauling or for some reason the whole of the UK just got it wrong, for my own self respect, I'm convinced all of you got it wrong, and channel 5 is the greatest visionary TV station in the history of broadcasting.

"Anything to declare sir!"

My mind quickly turns to the packet of Mintos I purchased in Auckland Airport, that are tucked in my pocket.

"no" I offer feebily

"Anthing to declare sir" her voice elavated from the last attempt

"no" I do better this time

"I just didn't hear you"

"cool" another countries immigration department fooled by my put on nervousness, now off to the fields to plant non indigenous seed species, ha ha ha!

Or alternatively off to the airports main hall, in the hope that Vince has shown up and purchased me coffee and a bacon roll. And there he was, not with a carboard sign or standing next to the chauffer he had hired to take us back into the city, nope, just sitting there reading, ahh well nothing changes, good to see the guy anyway, and for those interested in an independant analysis of his health, well...looks like he's lost a bit of weight, and all this galavanting in the Australian bush, has either left him with a bit of a tan or he's was just a bit dirty, too early to say.


*refers to nothing