Heh I recorded this in the “rest room”. 🙂

I’m starting to write this at 13:21 UTC on Wednesday 29 June which is 2:31 PM in London and 6:31AM in Vegas.

Well today has been a bit of a mixed bag thus far. With: sleep deprivation which I guess is partially self-inflicted, broken down trains which won’t open their doors to let one out, unhelpful or non-existent assistance, all conspiring against me. I’ve already declined two wheelchairs today, one because on a day when I have a 10 or 11 hour flight I want to take every opportunity to stretch the legs, and more importantly presumably wheelchairs are a finite resource and really should be allocated to the people who genuinely need them. While I’m having a rant, the airline food, chicken and pasta, was rancid, and economy seems to get smaller every time I fly.

There are some positives to take from today though. I was invited to the Virgin club house and treated to a full English breakfast: sausage, bacon, mushroom, tomato, toast, coffee and grapefruit juice. A gentleman was walking round even polishing shoes, heh and they even gave me new laces! And lovely fast wireless internet. Save for the plastic cutlery and the 5 quid per hour for the WiFi, I could have been in heaven!

I also had the company of a lovely young lady Estelle who originates from near Manchester in the UK, her mother still lives here, but Estelle lives in the Virgin Islands. Estelle has just returned from a cruise around western Europe with her mother and was waiting to board a flight to Antigua. She regaled me with tales of visiting places as random as Moscow and Fiji, and could well also be someone else who has-been around the world more times than the International Space Station! I must be the last person on the planet not to have done it yet? 27 days and counting though.

I took my seat aboard flight VS43 to Las Vegas at around 10:30AM although the flight didn’t get away until around 11:30, 45 minutes later than scheduled. The pilot reckons the flight should last just shy of 10 hours which sounds pretty optimistic when the flight is scheduled to take almost 11 hours to make the 5200 mile journey from London to Las Vegas. I guess time will tell, and the pilot has probably got a better idea about these things than yours truly.

The passengers to my right are pretty sociable and are off to the US for a year on some inaugural student work placement project set up by Sheffield Hallam University. One guy has never been to the US before and has signed up for a whole year without much idea about what he’s getting into. So really my little jaunt for a few weeks should be a comparative piece of piss.

Right, must think about battery life as I still have no clue where I’ll be able to buy a power cable for the Thinkpad. And I’ve get to get through American immigration unshaved. Ooopse, Freudian slip.

From seat 22D aboard a 747 heading west at 32000ft, bye for now.

And it’s very nice thank you very much. What lovely people my airline are.

The train I was on sat at the platform with the doors refusing to open and the lights blinking off and on.

Oh pants just realised I may have left part of my Thinkpad charger at Martin’s. agrgrgrgrgr. I wonder if I can get him to ship it to me.

anyway, where was I, they eventually fixed the train, I checked in and found myself in posession of an invitation to the club house where I have just had my shoes polished and enjoyed a full English breakfast and am trying to make the most of the £5 per hour wireless internet access.

Anyway, will have to conserve power until I can figure out where I’m going to get a replacement Thinkpad power cable. Agrgrgr.

It’s early, or is that late? After a pizza and a look at the new mPower from Humanware , i tried to get some sleep. It wasn’t happening. All things which i hadn’t had time to do kept running through my mind. So at stupid o’clock this morning i decided to cut my losses and jump on the train to london. Now headed to the airport for an early check-in and hopefully some breakfast.

This was recorded just before I got on the train at Preston railway station. I’m now in Epsom and plan to catch some sleep before heading to the airport in the morning.

Ok, after months of planning, and lots of money spent and hair lost, heh I’m not kidding about the hair, it’s finally time to get this round the world show on the road.

I am certainly not the first blind person to have gone all the way around the world. I think Jonathan Mosen has been round more times than a satellite. And to claim to be going round the world, while true, is slightly pretentious, as I’ll only be visiting 4 countries other than my own. Every journey is unique and I will be passing through 7 cities over the next 28 days. So stay tuned.

Today was pretty manic. I spent the morning finishing my washing and trying as much as possible to get a couple of work related projects boxed off. I had an appointment at the House of Hair for 2PM, heh I wasn’t kidding about loosing hair. The young lady who cut it was apparently with child and has her final pre-motherhood holiday in Portugal planned for a couple of weeks from now. I went and did a couple of fascinating errands in town like buying a couple of cables and a new jacket, and dropped by the Stanley for one last farewell drink before heading home to complete my packing.

I finally crammed the last of my possessions into my suit case around 5:30 and called a cab to get me and my baggage to the train station. I think I’ve thrown out all perishable food stuffs and locked everything which is lockable in my flat, so hopefully it’ll be safe for the next month. If not, well it’s too late to start worrying about it now.

I got to the station at around 6:30 to discover the next service to London wasn’t until 7:20, so I grabbed a coffee and a bacon letice and tomato sandwich (£4.85) and bought my train ticket (£41).

I rather self-consciously attempted to record a podcast from the station café, before hanging around on platform 4 feeling like I’d forgotten just about everything including my marbles.

The 19:20 London service arrived, all be it 5 minutes late and so here I am sitting on the train contemplating 30,000 miles over the next 4 weeks. Tonight I plan to stay with Martin in Epsom before leaving early on Wednesday to catch a direct flight from London to Las Vegas.

Thank you to everyone who has wished me well for the trip, and a big thanks in advance to everyone who is either putting me up or who’s assistance I hope not to have to rely on too much in the next little while.

I don’t think the photoblogging is working properly, I think you need to click the picture links in order to view the images on the FlickR site. Never mind, I’ll still try and post the odd pick from time to time. The audio posts should work just fine, and you should be able to copy the XML link in to your Podcatching client and have the audio updates delivered to you automagically.

This is Digital Dave the World Wide Wave Williams saying if you never hear from me again, it’s been nice knowing you all and I’m gonna miss you!

Don’t ask me why my photos aren’t posting correctly. You’ll just have to click the respective links.

Anyway the reason for this post. I was looking for news and some kind of guide to entertainment in Singapore which wasn’t Lonely Planet. And apparently I found the Sarong Party Girl!