Just to give you a heads up on forthcoming episodes here, I am bound for Greenland, via Copenhagen, then back to CPH and on to St Petersburg. This is advance work for a new trip, which will be running right behind me. I just have to be there first and make sure all in in order and remind everyone that we expect a perfect visit. After that I am off to check out all new places, which have to be looked at really hard, in great detail, notebook in hand.  This is when I am scouting possible destinations for the Private Jet trips.  There is always a good reason for us wanting to go somewhere, but there needs to be more than just one big draw, so the more the merrier in terms of worthwhile diversions, especially if there are some things totally unique to the destination right there. You can never count on someone who lives next to some jaw-dropping sight/site to be able to see the rest of their home area  through the eyes of foreigners. Thus, I go look. And then there are the many hotels to check out, sleep in, eat their food, talk to the local inbound operator, meet the guides, look for potential problems and ask a thousand questions. It can mean long days, sometimes with people who are totally on top of things and ‘get it’ and then there are plenty of others who just don’t have a clue. This is when it is like drawing blood from a stone. And I ALWAYS check the toilets, everywhere.  I am near PhD level on international toilet inspecting. No seat or lid is left unlifted.

Coming up – Yerevan, capital of Armenia, then up to Samara, then east, very east, to Irkutsk and Petropavlovsk, both in Siberia and continuing as far east as you can go in Russia to Khabarovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Vladivostok, home of the Russian Far East fleet and a place of such naval sensitivity that foreigners used to be banned from even going there. From there to get home, I fly down to Seoul and back to New York.  This long trip will be broken down in to many parts, so I hope you will come for the ride and don’t run out of steam.

So, to start at the beginning (an old custom and one that still seems to work), I am up in a plane … a nice Scandinavian one, from Newark to Copenhagen. And of course, I introduced myself to Madame la Purser as I boarded and said I’m a refugee from your business and anything she could do to rescue me from seat 36C would be greatly appreciated and it actually worked.  Many of these pleas tend to fall on somewhat newly deaf ears and she did not look like the too accommodating type. Very  senior, with the snowiest of white hair, but after the door was closed, a young f/a was sent back and I am summoned up to 8G, which is of course where I think should have been all along.

Going from NY to Greenland via CPH makes zero geographical sense at all. (Vera, I know it will help if you find your atlas now and keep it out dear, as otherwise you are never going to keep up – have one of your helpers assist you. OK?). But amazingly enough there is no air service WEST from Greenland to anywhere, which is hardly surprising once you have been there, as the whole place points to Denmark with as much fervor as all Moslems face Mecca. A severe shortage of mosques here though. They could almost have built a bridge to Newfoundland and only a few disoriented Newfies in search of cod or Ikea would have ventured forth. Thus I fly 7 hours east, to spend 3 hours on the ground, so I can fly 4 hours west. I think it warrants the Guinness Book for Records for daft traveling. Only real good thing is I end up with only a two hour time change (apart from losing tonight of course)

And lose the night I shall, as the bloody SAS flight left pronto at 1710, which is way too early for the Atlantic. (and they started to board a 60% full flight 50 minutes before departure). It will only be just after midnight NY time when we glide on to the concrete at Kastrup Airport and then I sit until 0315 NY time, which will be hell, as most of you know I am NOT a night bird. I usually find a reviving Tuborg or similar helps, as by that time you are dehydrated, even if you have drunk copious quantities of water in flight but are in a generally discombobulated  state. This reviving beer will set the personal economy back a fair old sum I can tell you. Welcome to hi-rent Scandinavia and airport prices – a bad combo.

Re losing the night … this being High Summer (I left June 22) we are going to have a curious light night as of course we are tracking severely NNE and thus it will never get anything like dark. I think l have seen (if that is the right word) my last dark night for some time. Kind of unusual to fly the Atlantic at night and NOT have a night of any kind. And to rub salt further into the wound, the flying map thingy on the wall screen shows us now south of where I shall eventually end up tomorrow.

Anyway SK Biz dinner was frankly nothing to get excited about. They produce a fancy looking menu and separate wine list that comes within millimetres of taking itself off, though not quite up to the great lush prose TWA menus of the early 70’s with their “Morning picked, dew fresh, sun kissed ….peas”, which to quote Basil Fawlty were ‘fresh when they were frozen”. Anyway, much OTT hyperbole here and I wonder who the hell do they think they are kidding? Mainly themselves.

Otherwise their classical music channel is fine … three warhorses. which is what plane pax want. We are NOT into the moment to hear experimental music or song cycles recently unearthed from Norse graves. Give us what we know and like and we can lie back in a semi- comatose state and enjoy. UA drives me mad as they think we don’t have an attention span of more than 6 mins and play many bits of things and spend half the time wittering on about them too.

We finally arrive in CPH dead on time and I get myself checked in for Greenlandair and there is their nice new A330 waiting, in their spiffy new colors too. They are now called Air Greenland, so what color do you think the plane should be? Hands up those who said British Post Box RED. It is totally painted all over; you could not lose this one in a crowd anywhere! And even on a Monday morning, it is packed to the rafters. Don’t think Ms Greenland will ever win Ms World as the passengers are a rather scruffy looking short-arsed gang. The 12-20 year old girls are all into the low slung jeans with the bare midriff look, which is all well and fine if your midriff is smaller than your jeans. but this lot are somewhat padded (I suppose could almost be blubber?) and it then immediately becomes seriously less than pretty. Metal adornments are de rigueur and one of them looks like she was the victim of a deranged staple gun attack.

Sadly none of the crew I met last year is here and this is a  much more mature group, but they sure smile a lot. They are all Danes, based in CPH and all they fly is this route, nothing else. And in the four hours 10 mins it took to bring me half way back to where I started, they never stopped being out and about in the cabin. Rather a dreadful “brunch’ meal (due to the four hours time difference, we were sked out at 0910 and in the other end at 0940, so neither one thing or the other). And yes Vera, those really are the times, I did not invent them. Much encouragement for imbibing alcohol (a Greenlandic way of life) and the smokers, of which there are many, must have been vibrating from lack of nicotine. When we get off in the sunshine and enter the terminal, the place is practically pea soup thick with smoke. 

We are in somewhere called Kangerlussuaq and of course, may be better known to you by its former name, Sondre Stromfijord.  Are you still with me?  It’s claim to fame is that it is perfectly geographically located right on the ‘over the pole’ sort of route from Northern Europe to the Middle and West of the USA and Canada.  Like Keflavik, in Iceland, and Shannon in Ireland, they were used to the aircraft of 20 years ago dropping in, sucking up a new load of fuel and off they went. Greenland is the country with unpronounceable names and also some of the longest words ever created.  I gazed at them in the in-flight magazine … some had more than twenty five letters.

Okay … you get a break here… there is an awful lot more to come… just wait until first Nellie and then all Mother Russia embraces me.