Getting old before you know it....

It appears to be a bit of a repetitive theme at present for me to discover that I am 'too old' for something, not often but sometimes I am ' too young' for something to, but it isn't often that I am discovering I am the 'right' age for something.

When I finished University aged 27 I discovered that the railcard I had was for 'Under 25s' and those in full time education, as my degree had just finished I was no longer able to apply for another 'Young Person's Railcard'. I asked what the next discount railcard was only to be informed it was the 'Old Age Pensioner' one. With nothing in-between for us aged 25 - 65, would you call us 'middle aged' I asked, 'no' was the answer she gave. So life continued as it does today with me paying the full adult rate for all train transport around the UK.

On a London Tube recently I discovered that up to the age of 35 (not over) I am eligible for IVF treatment - this is fantastic news if I wanted a baby and considering the fact that few Countries will allow me any kidn of working/holiday visa due to my age. Dispite the fact I've worked since I was 15 years old, I hold a 2:1 degree and have no criminal record once you past that age of 25 (or for some) 30 you are refused any visa of any kind and doomed to sit in your own Country for the rest of your life, unless of corse, you are one of the lucky ones with a professional/career and some amazing skills to go with it. I didn't discover Overseas Work Visas until I was already over the age of 25, it just wasn't something that was put my way or offered to me, or as silly as it sounds, we didn't have the internet to go and search something up and take up an overseas offer. If you weren't told about it, you simply never got to hear of it.

Three years ago then I was looking at BUNAC and discovered that they offered a special IEP Working Visa for New Zealand (ONLY) for those up to the age of 35 years. Thrilled as I was I looked into this, but never took it up as I felt leaving a flat behind in the UK that I couldn't sell (because of the economy) but needed to pay for wouldn't help my cause. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a month ago that I am STILL eligible for this visa - oh yes, you can apply and be accepted for the visa at 35yrs old and you can go at 36, you just can't TURN 36 yrs before being accepted for the visa. Needless to say, I have around applied and paid for the visa and am awaiting the very beautiful, wonderful IEP working Visa. I hope to start working in New Zealand in October 2011. I am as you might say 'over the moon' and looking forward to it all.

Now call me traditional and old fashioned but I do prefer good old maps or even Google prints out to such such modern things as Sat Navs and GPS. Maybe it is the love of most things paper that I have, perhaps it is the smoothing out of the folded sheets and its crackle that I love. Or maybe it is the dislike of someone telling me what to do - repeatedly if I don't listen the first time. I like to study maps, I like to see where I've been, where I am and where I am going. I like to look at the places I am passing by, I like to see the place names, the streams, the lakes and the rivers that I pass. I like to see the roads bypass each other and inter-twine as they go from one place to another through each other, over each other and into each other. I like to trail my finger along the paper, following the route of one particular road that I am travelling on, following its beginning in one place through to its end in another part of the country. I enjoy that. I like to see the highways/motorways, the B roads and lanes as they trail off to various locations whether it be a City, a Town or a Village. I like to look at the road colours, the symbols used for railroads, churchs, museums and other places of interest. I simply find maps interesting, fascinating and can study them for hours, I like to have that structure and map in my head of where I'm travelling from and to. I like to be able to see the roads in my head and know when to turn off or where I'm turning into, I want to be able to see my journey ahead of me, miles ahead of me before I undertake it - to know and see what is surrounding me at all times and then I can see all my options laid out before me of which way to travel and what to see.

With GPS and Sat Navs you simply don't get this. You put up the gadget, you tell it where you want to go, which can take time in its own right as you have to trawl through all the options of what the Sat Nav has to offer you only to find the options they have are none of the ones you want. The Sat Nav either doesn't understand the address you gave it, doesn't recognise the zipcode or postcode that you put in or it simply trys to tell you that the address/zipcode/postcode doesn't exist when you know it does. In America it appears that the GPS system will offer you ever Main Street in every State in the US with the exception of the one you want. Or it simply doesn't recognise the airport or it trys to take you on the highway for 30 minutes in order for you to turn back on yourself on smaller roads for 10 minutes in order for yu to get somewhere that is 20 minutes away from where you start in walking distance. Now to a British person you might just walk this, but as an American you won't. You drive. This is what I learnt from my American friends. So you spend 5 to 10 minutes swearing and fiddling with your GPS before starting your drive, only to swear at and then ignore the GPS because you don't like the way it tells you to go, so you then take your frustration out on fellow drivers and all this slowly leads to what is commonly known as 'Road Rage'.

But enough of that. This is about maps. In particular Toronto maps, I recently went o Toronto for the first time. I was looking forward to it, I know people who have been and have very much enjoyed the City. It is world famous for its Film Festival every September and its CN Tower. So I checked into the HI Toronto and naturally picked up a map. The very kind

Receptionist marked off a few places on the map for me, like where the hostel was located, where there were good eating houses and, of course the CN Tower. As I took to the streets what I wanted though was a Tourist Information Centre as the leaflets in the hostel related to nothing in the local area, they did however, offer me information on hostels located in Finland or (if I am a Canadian National) internships in Belgium and Germany. With these offered leaflets being completely useless to me I began my search following the map. Now Tourist Informations are easy to see on maps because of the clever way they do symbols that everyone understands. On these maps they are marked by a blue question mark and I could that there were a few of them. Sadly, as I arrived at various locations having followed the map for the nearest Information Centre I found nothing. I walked around several times under the Metro bridge and around the Bus Terminal, up and down the road and even asked a few people, including a hot dog vendor but he answered to the negative, shaking his head and confirming what I thought, that there was indeed no Tourist Information around these parts. however, it appears he was wrong too, because there is one and it is in the Metro Station itself underground. Now without opening another can of worms I couldn't help but notice that this was hardly a Tourist Information Centre but more of a 'Tourist Information stand' with a few leaflets dotted around the stand then repeated as you followed it round to where you begun. So not only did it take way to long to find, it was useless .

I don't know if anyone else has ever had this problem but a few days later it took me an hour to get to the Zoo when it should have taken me around 20 minutes. So to Toronto City Council - get someone on those streets and get your maps sorted. But if they don't at least next time I know not to trust their maps and to use my own - from within the memories of my mind.

Two Flights and an offensive pair of shoes....

I arrived in Syracuse (Upstate New York) last night. My friend who works for Virgin Atlantic had kindly put me on the stand by list for a morning flight from Heathrow, London to JFK, New York. She has done this for me before (twice) and never have we had any problems, it has always gone smoothly and I've always made the flight I wanted. But this time it was slightly different. She told me there was one seat left on the flight so there was a chance I would be bumped from the 10.35am flight to the 14.00 one, this wasn't a problem as such, but it would mean I would miss the internal flight (JFK to Syracuse with Jetblue) that I had pre-booked. Now this usually isn't a problem - I usually buy two single internal flights, so if the outgoing internal flight is affected by me not making the international flight it never affects the return flight. But for some reason this time I'd bought a return flight, so if I missed the outbound flight my return flight would become invalid and I would have to re-buy all the internal flights. I spoke to Jetblue who informed me that if I called them as soon as I knew I couldn't get on my UK to the the USA flight, I could have them change my internal flight from the 3.42pm one to the 10.30pm for a flat standard rate fee of $40 as the flight was still for the same day - with this in mind, I organised with one of my brothers that if I didn't make the 10.35am flight I would text him and he could call Jetblue and pay the $40 to change my flight, without any affect on the return one. It was all growing great.

So I arrived to check in with Virgin for my flight knowing there was only one seat left - if it was in First Class there was a good chance it was mine, Premium Economy - possibly mine, Economy...50/50 someone could just as equally walk in and pay for it there and then. But I was told that the flight was overbooked by 10 but that 'at that hour' many people didn't turn up for their flight (what crazyiness when you've paid £500 or more!!). So fingers were crossed. The staff member, Lucy, asked if I had filled out a request to be in the jump seat (explanation later), I told her that I didn't know anything about it, She said I should go to the Virgin Customer Desk and fill out a request but then she asked to see my shoes - I was wearing a pair of my walking boots - and suddenly she decided that I was not smart enough to go on the flight at all and refused to put me on the flight. Because of the number of other staff members she bought into the conversation there was no way I could simply go to another check in desk. I did say to her that I had travelled before this way a couple of times and that no one had bothered before about my shoes/boots but she wasn't interested. She called over a Manager who told me that if I could change my shoes (pictured left) to something smarter they would let me on the flight. After some quick and frantic phone calls to my friend and with her searching on Heathrow's website she told me that Terminal 5 (I was in T4) had an Accessorize shop where they sold smart(er!) shoes. T4 had nothing, my friend made the call to the shop while I dashed on to the Heathrow Express Train (thank goodness it's free!) to the next Terminal. Hopping off at T, I ran into Accessorize and purchased some less offensive shoes so I could return to the Virgin Check In Desk at T4 and be let on to the flight. I had to jump back on to the Express Train back to T4. The Virgin Staff who wouldn't let me on (Lucy) had disappeared but another member of staff who witnessed it all was still there, she asked to look at my shoes, my new ones (picture right) - liked them and signed me on to the standy by list for the flight. I still had to go through to the Departure Gate and it is only after everyone else has boarded they tell you if you are on the flight or not.

At the Departure Gate I grabbed as many freebie magazines and newspaper that I could (Virgin UK side are very good at this freebie reading material stuff, Virgin USA side do no such thing) as I knew that if I was going to be hanging around the airport for another 4 hours - I had already been there since 7am - I was going to need all the freebie reading material I could get my hands on! A lovely, friendly member of staff came over to me and explained that there was only one seat left on the flight. So she had spoken to the Pilot to see if he was happy for me to travel in the jump seat, he had said 'yes', the crew were also happy for me to travel in the jump seat, but she wanted to make sure I was happy. I said also said 'yes'. The jump seat is a seat usually used by the crew themselves for take off etc, it is not comfortable and is a 'lesser' seat than those found in economy. You pull it down, strap yourself in and off you go, but there is little to no comfort and not a chance of any sleep. They will (sometimes) move you from one seat to another for the take offs/landings and for the duration of the flight itself. You do (by all accounts) get great service - DVD player, first class meal etc because everyone realises/knows that you are in the gimp seat.
....Back at the Departure Gate (a lot happens here you know..), Virgin staff will sometimes (if there is space) offer 'special discounts on upgrades' to those passengers who might wish to upgrade themselves, these can be had for the 'discounted' price of £999 per person. Needless to say not many people take them up on the offer, which is great for people like me travelling on stand by. However, this time round there was a Portuguese family of 4 whose surname names on their passports didn't match the name on the boarding passes, something the check in staff should of noticed and changed I discovered, but alas they didn't. So here they were at the Departure Gate being told they couldn't fly. Possibly great news for me, but very sad for them........it was during all this commotion that my friend called - she could see the seating for the flight - and felt that I was in luck and on the flight, at the same time the nice staff member came over and informed me she had put me in Premium Economy "with extra leg room" great - I'm only 5 foot 3" but extra leg room is always welcome! I was on the flight. Sod you Lucy with your shoe regulations - 'Hello Accessorize', I'll be back in one of your shops in 14 days time to return a pair of £15 shoes that'll I'll have worn only twice to board two flights.....but most of all 'Hello New York' and my internal flight.
I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised by Jetblue. I've only flown by them once before and it was also from JFK to Syracuse, but I never remember the free snack and drink last time, perhaps it was because I was asleep across two seats for the duration of the flight, who knows. But this time I revelled in their freebies and for such a cheap airline I had a good enjoyable flight. So here I am sitting yet again at the HI in Syracuse (pictured below), a place that is quite well located - it would certainly make a good base if you hired a car and traveled around the Finger Lakes and surrounding area - but I only use it as a stop off point, a connection point as you might call it.

HI Syracuse is located around a mile from Downtown Syracuse, it is a nice walk down James Street.  It was Built in 1895 and has been owned by a member of Richard Geer's family over time, it features stained-glass windows and an ornate staircase. The hostel is centrally located to the Finger Lakes, Lake Ontario, and the New ork State Fair. You can explore Syracuse's history at the Onondaga Historical Association, Erie Canal and Salt Museums, or St. Marie Among the Iroquois. The zoo and Carousel Mall is a bus trip away and you can also see a baseball game or the gorgoeus Fall foliage. In winter I believe there is Downhill, cross-country skiing and skating availale nearby.  I stay here on my way to Watertown and the Thousand Islands via Trailways buses.