Wednesday, December 15, 2010

logic...

25 years of loving it……the sights the sounds and the places seen and experienced…..the fun and the weariness of it all. A quid for every flight or air mile (didn´t exist when I started).

The funny things that happened…the strangest sights, the behaviour of others, the people you meet, and the stories they tell..

Working for German companies who treated me well (Business Class) has enabled me to see the world at their expense, and believe me I have seen the world……

24 major countries left to visit excluding the wastes that form the top and bottom of this planet. I have been to every class of 4 star available from US to Asian and even Arabia…..
an expert on Hotels…Thomas Cook should employ me to write reviews..

It all started with an army joke……anyone like  music…yes sarge!… well move that bloody piano ……

My boss a apper German Berliner walked in and said….do you know where Toronto Canada is…yes it up an left a bit of New York….good you are on the two fifteen from Frankfurt  …go home a pack.

It was eight thirty on a Tuesday morning…twenty minutes later 15,000 US in my pocket I was off to the airport (MD´s had credit cards those days).

Seem we had delivered German engineered rubbish to a client in the Canadian back world and thought we could get away with it…joiks!

The Mounties thought different they knew the difference between French rubbish and the German !

So off I was to explain…..it is the German thing you know to explain ! anything goes wrong …I can explain !

It´s not our fault !, I can explain (Nuernberg all over again).

One lovely Swissair flight via Zurich later I arrived in the big Apple…A logical Air Canada to Toronto didn´t fit into German logic…you went west you flew to NY first !...Brilliant

US customs had a bloody field day with my passport…remember Lybian built I is…!!!

Siiir, you were born in Libya ?...yes….Why ?...have to ask mummy that one !...two hours later ( no sense of humour ) I´ve missed my connection to Toronto in Enuitland.

Air Canada have offered to put me up with the Stewardesses !....could not believe my ears!

So off we go to a lovely little home spun , gentile run hotel called “Holiday Inn”. Sound small and sweet.

I believe every story I have ever heard about pilots and stewardesses, then and now…they are true..!

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

becoming an "in betweener"

it was my father´s doing...he was a soldier in the british army stationed in Northern Africa.
free time, hot weather and rest is history.....born late in the afternoon of a hot June in 1960 I came into the world of the army barracks,  and there familiar accomodations.

Although we spent the first year in Africa, Libya to be precise, we soon got used to moving from one place to the another, a new school , a new posting, the boxes never really unpacked in the spare room, long nights in the back of cars, crossing the channel between  the UK and BFPO....but always comfortingly similar... Army !...the instilled traveller instinct was never broken.

Now 25 years + onward I have become an "in betweener"....living in two worlds...one the home base, secure, a place to rest and the other....the ever changing world of the traveller... it was Holiday Inns and Sheratons that took up the line of familiarity......