January 1st we spent a day doing the kind of things you do when you’re travelling. We caught the shuttle from Circus Circus at about 12 noon.

Our shuttle driver was a tall, sun weathered lady with long dark steel grey hair who had no compunction about calling out the rude, inconsiderate people on the road, yakking on her phone (hands free of course) to her buddies and showing us her picture of her very gorgeous blue eyed, roan coloured American Pitbull on her phone. She had this sign up:

We gave her a generous one. Hope she can fix her sign with it.

I think we must have booked a Delta flight because it was the only one available at a reasonable price or at a particular time. Either way it doesn’t matter because as our 2nd experience flying Delta it’s definitely our last. I will move hell and high water to avoid travelling US domestic via Delta in future. Baggage drop was painful and super expensive, yes we know our 4 pieces are over the limit but you really want to charge us $90 bucks a piece to cover a few pounds over? Even though you KNOW we’re travelling internationally?? $360 it was gonna be. We spent $100 on a cheap large luggage piece and paid the $125 for an additional piece and spent $225 instead of $360. Assholes. The plane was way too cosy for my liking too and no free drinks. I’m talking WATER people. In comparison to our Virgin Atlantic experience it was like chalk and cheese. I’m going Virgin in future if I can and Southwest too. So there we are in the airport opening up four pieces of luggage (now five!) and redistributing and weighing bags. Then there’s TSA. Which was slow and laborious all the way through. And to top it off we must have set off some alerts because by the time we opened up our luggage when we got to the hotel every single piece of luggage had been rifled through and treated NONE too gently. When you see a hard back coffee table book with a nice sleeve cover on it WRAPPED very carefully in polar fleece jackets do you not think that maybe the person who owns said coffee table book is trying to make sure it arrives without ANY damage? So perhaps DON’T just throw the book back in the case where the sleeve gets all mushed and creased? Pillocks the lot of them. Rant over. Oy my first world problems.

Anyway by the time we landed, got our five pieces of luggage from baggage collection, hopped a Thrifty shuttle to Thrifty car hire, jumped in our Ford Crown Victoria Royal (Tim refers to it as like driving his TV room armchair) and drove out to Hilton Garden Inn Valencia opposite Six Flags, Magic Mountain it was about 6pm. After some dinner and some necessary computer related errands we headed to bed as we were up for the 9.30 shuttle to Six Flags this morning.

Started at the Park at 10.30am out by about 3.30pm and managed to do the majority of Coasters there.

Started off with the Viper (specialty in corkscrew turns) then went to Tatsu, then did the Riddler’s Revenge, the Batman ride, the Green Lantern, the Goliath and Scream. Seven rides in all, Superman ride was closed for the day and X2 didn’t open till the afternoon, I’d had enough by then! They were all great fun apart from Green Lantern which I wouldn’t recommend to ANYONE. We both ended up with a bit of a headache after that one. Certainly put excess blood pressure in the head! Tatsu was awesome because it actually hoisted you into the flying position you would be in if you could literally fly!

Tomorrow we head back to LAX, drop the hire care off and then hop on a 15 hour plane trip to home (well plus the 5 hour one from Sydney to Perth). I’m very much looking forward to going home – we have had the most amazing, once in a lifetime experience and I am always going to love that we were able to do this but being away from the dogs and friends and family for this long has been hard. I don’t think I would ever do it again (even if we were millionaires!) as it is just too long to be away from the furkids. I miss agility almost like missing a limb! I cannot wait to get back into it. And most of all I am looking forward to meeting our newest family member, a rambunctious fellow by the name of Colt!

There’s going to be heaps to do when we get home – not the least is possibly putting together our own coffee table book of our adventures over here in US and Canada. In fact I will probably include the whole year – Rome, Florence, Pompei, UK, Belgium, Sydney, Melbourne, Canada, USA. 2012 has indeed been a magical year for us, but I’ve decided 2013 is going to be just as much fun. And yes I am actually looking forward to going back to teaching. A year off has certainly shown me that I do indeed love my job, teaching in all it’s aspects – whether it be new little 8th graders, taking on the challenge of 11th grade seniors or taking a class at my Agility club on Tuesday nights.

2013 is here and I’m feeling fine.