I’m travelling in a pressurized metal cylinder travelling at Mach .85 (900km/h), 13km above sea level, sitting on top of 240,000 litres of avgas and it’s -50 outside. What could possibly go wrong?

Another airport, another Kubrickian design ethos.

After a while the unrelenting antiseptic sameness of airports worldwide – exposed metal beams, smooth tiled floors, walls, circuits, promenades of overpriced shops, all painted the same unrelenting neutrals, begins to drag a bit… not to mention no doubt leaving regular travelers wondering at any given time what the hell country they’re currently in. At one stage in my life I considered interior design as an alternate career, and now I wonder what it would have been like to be an interior designer of airports – presumably when I was done with a few years of designing psych wards. I imagine it’d be pretty simple – a bit of white here, a bit there; the odd splash of white to liven things up. Plain colours to keep people from getting in too much of a flap when their plane is inexplicably delayed five hours.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind doing one in ‘Incidendiary Red’ one day, to see how long it lasts before someone finally cracks and it makes it on the 6:00pm news.

Thankfully, it was plain (though rushed) sailing through the plain white seas of Melbourne airport. I passed a woman wearing a tote bag it looked like she’d denuded Fred Flintstone of his tunic for. She looked lost, absent minded – the hazed expression of an exasperated traveler, experiencing the transit equivalent of the Gruen Transfer.

Stepping onto the plane, I had the usual sinking feeling that accompanies me as I heard to what inevitably seems to be row 186, three from the rear of the plane. I walked past rows of successfully less smug individuals, from first class, to business class (clutching at imaginary Blackberries deprived of them before takeoff, toward the distant lowing of the denizens of cattle class, economy, hoping to spend a as pleasant a time as possible in the feed yards before slaughter. Those who weren’t tending to infants or struggling for places to stow hand luggage the size of hatchbacks were settled into their slightly too squeezy seats, experimenting with their inflight entertainment systems. We watched an amusing onboard presentation of air cabin safety presented in computer generated graphical form, then eased back onto the checked fabric of our 777-300ER seats and reset our watches glumly, as one, upon being told of our thirteen hour and thirty five minute flight to LA.

I’d never been on a 777-300ER and my experiences, at least, were that it was about as good as economy class gets. The V Australia crew were almost unrelentingly chipper, we were constantly fed and watered, and the cabin was delicately lit with mood lighting – an inky post-sunset indigo washed the ceiling as we approached dusk, the inflight entertainment system was top notch, and those who weren’t similarly indulging either flipped through books, screwed ear plugs into their heads to the point of introducing cerebral oedema, and slipped blinds over their eyes in various attempts to find the most bearable way of making more than 13 hours non-stop air travel as pleasant as possible.

After a fitful half doze thanks to a woman in front of me who’d seemingly found the magic ‘parallel to the floor’ seat back position it was pre dawn. The ambient mood lighting of the night before was gone, replaced with a strange, slightly otherworldly pinkish colour scheme that would have been more at home in a butchers window, attempting to make old cuts look fresh, than on a plane. My eyes felt as though someone had poured a cement mixer load of gravel into them, repeated blinking seemingly only distributing the grit. The cabin was abuzz, landing apparently imminent, so I was slightly disheartened to find out I’d been roused from my sleep three hours out of LA. I absentmindedly inhaled a lukewarm frittata, scrambled egg and button mushroom breakfast, got my stuff together, and prepared for landing.

LA was the hole I always remember it being upon approach (sorry anyone from LA who’s reading this, but I’ve got to say your city isn’t terribly inspiring when heading in). At least this time, however, we approached in a slightly unusual manner, heading past the Hollywood sign out of the port window. John Lennon once famously said, “Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco”, and based on this approach he was right – we banked starboard over a seemingly endless array of empty parking lots bounded by chain-link fences, broken concrete roads, weeds and disrepair before finally plunging lower, passing through smog-bound seas of eucalypts and palm trees before landing at LAX.

After getting a breathtaking bus ride across half of LAX to the terminal (what fun!), we arrived at Customs and Immigration which was the usual shambles. Needless to say it took around two hours for us to clear two desks and pick up baggage, and the new rule of thumb I can recommend to you is “if someone offers you another line, ignore it” – we were almost into customs checks when we got thoughtfully redirected to another line that too an additional fifteen minutes, then after getting our bags we were redirected to yet another line that was slower than the one we were already in. Everyone was yelling over the din, struggling to be heard, but making precious little headway. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

After picking up an Escape “SUV” (shudder) from Budget – yes, I was talked into a larger car, I’m embarrassed to admit – we hit I-405 then I-8 South for San Diego. Both Nic and I were struggling but thanks to her actually managing to get a couple of hours of sleep, she was given the first shift. I finally nodded off from the passenger seat, no mean feat when you consider that I was in the position I’d normally be driving from in Australia.

At the point of exhaustion we pulled into Carlsbad, did a hot lap to Legoland to get a feel of the place, then hit the factory outlets but just shamefully went through the motions, stiff limbed and lost in another time zone. After an hour of faux shopping and a collective shrug of ennui we gave up, hit a place called Ruby’s which was decked out in faux-50’s diner style (complete with a train set running on tracks hanging off the ceiling, around a large model of the Spruce Goose with three out of four propellers slowly rotating hypnotically, and collectively ingested hamburgers, fries, hot dogs, turkey sandwiches and a couple of gallons of Coke.

Feeling slightly more human we hit the road again, the Escape thrummed rhythmically over freeway concrete rippled, parted and groomed in the style of an old mans combover, and upon reaching our turn off into our hotel in San Diego promptly missed it, and did another lap back up I-5 North, then down I-5 South, and back onto I-8 West on our final approach, finally hitting our mark – and the hotel - 30 minutes later. Nice place though. If you’re ever in San Diego I can definitely recommend Comfort Suites off Camino del Rio South. You can’t miss it- it’s done in Spanish Revival style unlike the rest of San Diego.

We unpacked and I crashed on my bed, exhausted, knocking back a scotch out of a wax paper coffee cup. It’s not how I roll. It’s just being beyond the point of caring. I’m sure the good people who made Caol Ila wouldn’t have given a rats.