ROD'S DIARY FEB 17 -- THE 48 HOUR BIRTHDAY

Today we embark on the final journey which includes a fuel stop. Five and a half hours to Anchorage, fuel stop, four and a half hours to LA. Estimated 11 hour journey. We shall see.

It's my birthday today and as we cross the international date line I will get a 48 hour one. However not being too partial to the aging process I tend to avoid birthdays and celebrated it prematurely with Kathy and the kids before we left. The kids got me a new i-pod engraved "to dad" and put on it a load of family photos to keep me company and proudly show to friends and also loaded on many of my favourite albums. Nice thought!!
So I didn't say a word about this and thankfully except for a couple of isolated comments (Nicko, cos he is glad I am catching up!!) I seemed to be getting away with it. On the first leg it was the usual, get the laptop out and take care of emails to outbox and diary of barrier reef including choosing the photos which was fun as loads of good fishy shots!

ROD'S DIARY FEB 16 -- TOKYO SHOW

Got up 9-ish to deal with some emails then back to bed til about 1pm -- feeling the flight and the night a bit. As I think I said before in Japan we go on stage very early, 5.50 pm in fact, so I left for the venue at about 2 as there were things I had to do.

Flight left Cairns at 9.25 am for Narita Tokyo. Not too painful at the airport as Cairns is fairly quiet and the flight was uneventful -- caught up on some previous diaries and slotted a load of offline mail into the outbox to get off on arrival at the Tokyo Hotel. Then watched some TV and came across a very interesting film documentary -- it was already on so don't know the title -- but it was about the discovery in a place about halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem of a tomb potentially containing the "bone boxes" (don't know how to spell Jewish name of these) which the movie makers/investigators/archaeologists claimed could be those of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, his brothers and...

ROD'S DIARY FEB 13-14

Got up for an hour at 2am (4pm UK time) to deal with any mail as cant be sure bberry will work out on the Reef about two and a half hours out of Cairns and will be on the boat overnight so no laptop access. By doing this I wouldn't hold up everything Val and Mary are doing, particularly around the media plot, by my going AWOL for a couple of days. Finally got up at 6.30 to walk across from the hotel to the boat terminal and boarded The Compass which would take us out to Hastings Reef on the Outer Reef to meet up with our main diving boat the well named Reef Encounter (Hastings Reef today, Agincort yesterday -- are they all named after famous battles -- won one, lost one!!)