a shortcut to a stomach ulcer

So I’m seriously rethinking how I booked my travel for this trip. Everything was going fine: I got up at five in the morning, and I got the taxi on time, I arrived at the bus terminal super-early. And then, the wheels on the bus did not so much go round and round, as come off the wagon. The Greyhound bus-man responded with mirth to my rather tight schedule, leaving me imagining which rotisserie he will be occupying in the afterlife. I met another fool who had booked the bus for the airport who came up with the idea of hiring a car. Which meant we had to go to Canberra airport to get it. Which meant that we had to deal with “Thrifty”: by which they mean they are thrifty with the number of IQ points you need to work there. An inordinate amount of time later, they handed over the keys to a car other than the one we had hired, and we started driving. And I started calling Air New Zealand, to find out how late I could be before I missed the flight. The goal of 10.30 was set and so we drove, and I palpitated. My stomach slowly came to grips with the reality that I had decided to replace its rightful six other hours of sleep with a cup of coffee and a boatload of stress, and decided to introduce me to how it would feel should it every try to burrow its way out of my body. I’m not good with flight deadlines at the best of times, I panic that I’m going to miss them and turn up hours early, so actually being late was not my ideal start to the trip. Or the best way of conducting normal social chitchat with my travelling companion – as small talk inevitably does, it wormed it’s way around to the ‘what is your phd topic’ question and I think a direct quote of my response is: “Art history. Australian. 1960s.” After which time I got to account for the prices in the art market and the claims to value of Aboriginal art – reasonably complex issues that I would normally struggle to answer in an articulate fashion after only two hours sleep and before nine in the morning, but add a nice haze of stress and I think I start to borrow Yoda’s sentence structure. “Art it is, Aboriginal, yes, unique it is.”
We made it with ten minutes to spare. And the plane was late. It turned up, the tortuous boarding process was completed (oh, and if you are late you get to sit up the back with the kids, joy). And they had lost the food. So we waited another thirty minutes. Finally the food arrived, and we set off for Auckland. Where I now am, making the most of the fact that wifi doesn’t effect navigation systems when you are inside the airport, apparently. It’s now three p.m. Sydney time, and I’ve got another twenty hours of travel to go. Gah. I have, however, noticed that there is some tasty looking NZ beer on tap here in the compound, so after I have read through my paper there will be treats, oh yes.