10:34 am – one hour out of Honolulu

An astonishing number of people have told me they wouldn’t want to travel to Australia because of the long flight – 10 hours from Honolulu, 15 from the California coast, and a whopping 22 hours from New York.  These are daunting numbers, but consider this: in the days of the convict transports from London to Botany Bay, or Sydney, the passage took an average of 253 days, all the while stuffed into the sweltering, suffocating, unsanitary hold of a former slave ship, shackled in leg irons for the entire voyage.  Complaining these days is unseemly and an insult to those miserable, suffering passengers of old.

4:20 pm – eight hours out of Honolulu.

Oh my God, get me the hell off this plane!