It's been a long road... getting from there to here.

That's the first line from the theme song of Star Trek Enterprise series, originally written for the movie Patch Adams. And it aptly entitles this entry - first about blogging again after 3 years, then about yesterday's 9-hour journey from PJ to KK.

The first long journey... well... I got a Blogger account while I was visiting my brother in Cambridge in 2004 and had a single "test" entry which was left there all this while. It felt too daunting a task to figure out how to blog then and I resorted to sending out my travelogues in Word instead. Later that same year, I started another blog account in xanga. I wrote a grand total of 5 entries before my self-predicted writer's block came to pass. Being the sentimental archival buff that I am, I decided the other day to merge those 5 entries with that lone one as I renew my Blogger account which I must say is sooo much easier to use now. So yeah - all 6 postings now sit happily in their new home under the Blog Archive of 2004, minus the comments from the original postings. You can't take it all sometimes. Oh, and if you dare venture into another piece of my ancient history, go to http://www.mrdata.com/~gce for the website I put together before I came back from the States in 1997. Er... I must warn you though that it'll throw you into a realm of possibly intolerable outdatedness! Still, I praise God for it as it did bring me quite a number of job offers then! I've actually been kinda reluctant to update it to a more contemporary look - did I mention I'm a sentimental archival buff?

Ok - the second long journey...

Left my house to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) at about 3:15pm yesterday. Oh - and on the way swung by Alex & Grace's to pick up a DVD that I needed to take with me to do some work. Alex had actually taken the trouble to go all the way back from a Rendezvous event to rig up a way for me to pull out the DVD from their postbox. TQ!

Er... where was I? Oh - so my parents drove me to the LCCT to catch my 5:10pm flight to KK. When we got there at about 4:15, I jumped out the car and tried to open the boot. Ok - now have to cut the long "THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING, THE BOOT'S NOT OPENING!" story short. I tried, my mum tried, my dad tried, a policemen and three other LCCT male personnel tried and well, you know... they really made those old volvos super safe and secure lor! We even tried frantically pulling at the back seats to no avail. I did manage a frustrated peek at my luggage through that pull-down arm-rest thing though. After a bit, tension in my family was running really high. One of the men timidly asked me what time my flight was. I told him, and he timidly told me that he didn't think I'd be making it.

SO... I walked in to the check-in counter to be told that indeed I had missed the flight. I then walked out to... well... actually, I don't quite know what I walked out to do. Anyway, I walked back in again to queue up to buy a ticket for the 9:15 flight. Then I walked out to goh back into the volvo. My mum was really tired by then so I took over the wheel and drove all the way back to PJ to catch their regular mechanic next to DUMC SEA Park just before they closed for the day. The guy took 5 minutes to open the boot. I got my luggage out and put it in the back seat. Then we went to SS2 for a pre-Mother's Day dinner and coffee at Secret Recipe - hahahah, praise God for the bonus time I had bought for a RM325 one-way ticket to KK! One roasted chicken later, I drove back to LCCT, caught my breath and my plane, reached KK and got picked up by Eric who took me to a backpacker's hostel called Velvet where I checked-in at about 12:15am.

9 hours. Doorstep to doorstep. PJ to KK.