Return

For all of the trepidation I felt over the marathon flights between Los Angeles and Melbourne, they weren’t too bad. The seats were far enough apart that I didn’t feel crushed, and there was always plenty to watch on my little screen. On the return leg from LA to Melbourne I decided to take the opportunity to just binge the entire first season of ‘The Last of Us’, which isn’t on any of my streaming subscriptions at home, so that took care of at least ten hours of the time.

Arriving in Melbourne at dawn, I had some coffee and did some writing and photo editing, then boarded my final aircraft of this holiday: another unpleasant little Virgin Boeing 737-800. Goodbye free booze and small touchscreen full of movies and TV shows, and hello… other people. Ugh.

It turned out that this particular flight was going to be even more ghastly than normal. There was a baby two rows behind me that started crying almost immediately. There was another baby two rows behind her that also started crying almost immediately. And across the aisle there was an entire party of severely autistic people and their carers, returning from some sort of Neurodivergency Con, judging from their matching T-shirts, who could only express themselves in shrieks and bellows.

It was so awful that it circled around and became hilarious. The two screaming babies and the autistic people actually set each other off. Either the babies thought that this was a game of who can howl the most penetratingly, or the autistic people thought that the babies’ screams give them permission to let loose. Then the screaming autistic people panicked the babies and they screamed louder.

And just to add a sweet cherry onto the parfait of misery, it was at this point that the battery finally ran flat on my noise-cancelling headphones.

But the good thing about horrible flights on budget airlines is that they eventually come to an end, and you are probably somewhere you want to be. And so it was that I landed in Perth and shortly thereafter was back at home.

The Nerd didn’t get a Fiat like Benny or Explorer Sam, or a Vespa like Admiral Ackbar, but he had the ‘Friends’ set to bring together my other Lego holiday companions and regale them with stories.