Long

While waiting for my departure from Melbourne airport for Los Angeles International, I spied a 20-something person in a streaked mullet, hot pink patterned T-shirt, baggy jeans, statement sneakers and an oversized white vinyl belt. Hey, buddy, the 80s called and… actually, they don’t want their look back; you’re quite welcome to keep it. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

There followed more than 14 hours in the 47^th row of a Boeing 787, a far bigger and more comfortable plane than the previous one – I had an infotainment screen and a USB port! I also didn’t have a despondent Irishman looming out of the seat next to me. In fact the seat next to me was empty, so I got to share it the delicious boon of extra space with the man in the window seat.

I won’t say that 14+ hours just went by in a snap, but there was a good range of movies I wanted to see, and that took up more than 10 hours alone.

- Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Verdict: Fun and funny)

- Us (Verdict: Cool concept with amazing performances, but clumsily executed)

- Renfield (Verdict: Nicholas Cage camping it up as Dracula – need I say more?)

- No Hard Feelings (Verdict: Strangely dark rom com with refreshingly flawed and unusual characters)

- Asteroid City (Verdict: Meh - I may be reaching Wes Anderson Whimsy Saturation Point)

Coming into Los Angeles, we flew over a skyscape of cliched fluffy white clouds and a richly coloured sunrise. Then as we descended, we were enveloped in a fog of unbroken cold grey nothingness, so dense and uniform that everyone was startled when we touched down – we thought we’d still been hundreds of metres higher in the air.

At the break of dawn after a 14+ hour flight, we were in no mood to be messed around by LA customs and security. But LA customs and security couldn’t care less about our mood, so it was straight into a snaking, sour queue, to eventually be photographed, fingerprinted and otherwise biometrically molested.

It’s ironic that LAX, the western gateway of the Land of Freedom and Liberty, looks like a soviet-era Brutalist Russian government building circa 1974, with hard terrazzo floors, dull plywood ceilings and harsh fluorescent lighting. It had the wifi connectivity of a Russian building in 1974 as well. The good news is that for all the oppressive sense of inefficient bureaucracy, they actually processed me pretty quickly, and I found that I had nothing to do before my next flight in six hours’ time except watch homeless people surreptitiously sneak into the bathrooms to wash up. I killed some time in the only Starbucks in LA without wifi (d’oh!) and surprisingly expensive and surprisingly terrible coffee. I mean, I was expecting it to be expensive and terrible, but they really upped the ante here.

One unique thing about LAX is that it plays a public address recording the announces that LAX is closed to the public 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… except for people catching flights, dropping passengers off or picking them up, or airport staff actively on their shifts. So presumably all of those homeless people I saw dragging around bags of empty cans, fouling the bathrooms and blathering at pretty girls were here legitimately, just waiting to catch the 1247 to Albuquerque.

After three hours I could finally check my bag at Southwest airlines, the Ryanair of America. It was simple enough getting the label from a kiosk, but as I put it in the bag drop, the attendant demanded to know my TSA pre-approval number. When I told him I didn’t have one, he directed me to a different Southwest queue.

After 45 minutes of standing in that queue, I finally got to speak to another Southwest employee, and explained the situation to her, stating that apparently I needed a TSA pre-approval number, whatever that was. She looked at me and asked, “Do you want a TSA pre-approval number?”

“Not particularly,” I replied. “But do I need one?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “Next!”

So off I went. Upstairs, security screening was strict (Take your laptop out of your bag! Remove your shoes! Remove your belt! Empty your pockets! Stand in this booth with your hands up while we bombard your body with unspecified radiation!) but fast and impersonal. I got patted down because the zipper on my jeans is made of some sort of dangerous super metal, but the agents were professionally disinterested and the whole thing was over in three minutes.

By that stage it was midday, so I unwound with some chips and guacamole and a margarita in an overpriced airport bar, listening to the live announcements of gate changes and boarding calls, which were mildly amusing – the staff have clearly learnt that the best way to deal with exasperating idiot passengers is with an attitude of gently mocking humour. I was herded onto a short commuter flight of barely an hour from LA up to Las Vegas, then had a couple of hours in the Vegas departure concourse to wait for my next flight and have a very American snack of unappetising french fries loaded with unnatural cheese sauce and sad bacon dregs.

My final flight, another drab little Boeing 737-800 running from Nevada to Colorado, had a moment of Peak America as we were about to taxi out. The flight attendant revealed over the PA that one of the passengers had been accepted into the US Marines. She had him raise his hand to identify himself, thanked him for his (upcoming) service, and lead the entire plane in a round of applause. I clapped along because, sure, good for him, but I was thinking “Congratulations on getting a job you want, I guess, but how is this any of our business?” I couldn’t decide if it was noble but sort of creepy, or creepy but sort of noble.

The local man sitting next to me muttered, “Don’t get dead,” so clearly I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t waving a little flag and saluting.

After another 90 minutes of flight, we touched down in Colorado Springs around mid-evening, and I ran into the only significant problem I’d encountered since leaving Western Australia – I couldn’t see my ride amongst the gargantuan vans and pickup trucks in the pick-up/drop-off lane outside, and this little provincial airport didn’t seem to have wifi so there was no way to call or text. I stood in the late autumn chill for nearly an hour, turning over my options. Eventually, after ducking back inside to make sure I couldn’t see my friend, I discovered that there was one specific point on the concourse when I could get a faint wifi signal, and we could finally text each other. After that, we quickly met up, drove to his place where I’m staying, and after 3 airlines, 5 airports and 37 hours of travel I could finally stop.