The itinerary changed

Only two days after I bought the ticket, the travel agent called me in a panic. She told me that with this ticket, I have to go “round the world”. That means that if I want to visit New Zealand, I can’t skip over it on my way to Australia. I would need to touch down in Auckland for and hour and literally change planes. Also this change pushed me over the mileage limit again and I had to give up the plan to fly from Cairns to Auckland. Now I will make my way back to Sydney to for the connection to Auckland. On the plus side while we were discussing this change, I asked about stopping in San Francisco and there was no extra cost for that. So here I am in California…

I left London at 11am on 30 November and arrived in San Francisco at 13:00 on the same day. I am staying with my friend Ken and his lovely wife Nora and beautiful daughter Katie. I am here on a chilly but sunny morning at the kitchen table with a white cat on my lap which is shedding white hair all over my black top, Ken lives in a tiny place called Monte Serenos, the nearest small town is Los Gatos and the nearest biggish town is San Jose. This is slap bang in the middle of Silicon Valley and the local paper is full of the latest news on Intel and AMD and all the big IT companies as they are all right in this area. The father of Katie’s best friend is one of the engineers at Sun who worked on the Sparc processor.

Yesterday it rained all day and I was suffering from jetlag. Nora took me into Los Gatos for lunch and a wander round the shops. In the evening the family went off to see Gwen Stefani - she comes from the town they lived in 8 years ago and they knew her when she was just getting started. Today we are going to Santa Cruz and tomorrow to Napa to visit the wine country and sample some Chardonnay (yummy). On Sunday I leave San Francisco and fly to Melbourne via the stop over in Auckland.