A Little More Luck

By Frank Nelson

A Little More Luck-and a lot more laughs-continues the wonderful globetrotting lifestyle of Frank and Maria Nelson.

Three years after leaving their adopted home in New Zealand, and armed now with freshly-minted American green cards, the pair settle down for a year in Colorado. In the city of Boulder, the newly arrived journalists and nurses find themselves grappling with such slippery customers as political correctness, prairie dogs, the tax man, the effects of altitude and more trashy television channels than can possibly be good for you.

Next the nomadic Nelsons return to England for 10 more months of hilarious house and pet-sitting with Animal Aunts-plenty long enough to appreciate that when it comes to the British and their animals, it's not just the dogs that are barking. Frank and Maria also find time to explore France and Spain besides taking trips to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Mexico.

Finally it's back to the States, this time to check out those crazy Californians in sunny San Diego. World travel as a way of life is a hell of a job, but somebody's got to do it

"This very funny sequel to All You Need is Luck crackles with dry British humour and will delight travellers the world over."

(Visit the Web site www.allyouneedisluck.com)

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 7, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595754250

Frank Nelson

Frank Nelson has worked as a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines around the world. He and his wife Maria, a registered nurse, have two grown-up children and a home in New Zealand. They are currently living in Santa Barbara, California, though they could well be somewhere else by the time you read this.

Book preview

Introduction.

We set off from New Zealand in June of 1996 for one, possibly two, years of overseas travel. Seven years later we’re still going strong. That’s a long time to be on the road but then you know what it’s like trying to park around here. Seriously though, seven years is a pretty substantial and significant slab of time, especially in an Old Testament sort of way. Sounds like we should be on the lookout for droughts and floods, feasts and famines, maybe the odd plague of frogs or locusts, and another six sons to add to the one we’ve already got.

I’m sure our friends and family wonder how we manage to keep living this life. How it is that while they get up and head off to work every day, often to jobs they openly admit to hating, we are apparently able to flit around the world at will. I think they probably wonder how on earth we can afford it for a start, perhaps quietly suspecting we’ve trousered some major lottery winnings and just haven’t bothered telling anyone.

They likely also puzzle over how we’ve managed, for example, to find jobs for a few months in Australia, hop over to work in England for a few more, then pop back to New Zealand to catch up with friends before perhaps spending a year or so in various parts of America. The fact that along the way we have regularly taken anywhere between two and five months off each year purely as holiday is another mystery which has, I believe, furrowed a few brows. And the reason I think people ponder our unorthodox lifestyle is because we often find ourselves asking exactly those same questions. In a nutshell: How have we been able to lead this charmed life, do so many wonderful things and visit so many fantastic places, for so long? I don’t know the answer but I’m certain sheer good luck has a lot to do with it.

In seven years of moving around the globe we have lost just about everything at one time or another. Luggage, bearings, patience, credit cards, minds, shirts (several times), tempers, our faith in various things, more of my hair, a house, some…Hang on a minute, did you say a house? Well, yes, and it wasn’t just any old house. It was a huge great thing, probably worth a few million quid, perched in spacious grounds just outside Richmond Park and within sight of central London on the occasional clear day, or much more frequently if you happened to have the Hubble telescope bolted to the roof.

Maria and I were back in England for the third time in as many years working for our favourite house and pet-sitting agency, Animal Aunts. We’d done scores of similar sits so we blithely marched into the park with Georgie and Sid, two of the daftest Dalmatians known to man. We strode along enjoying the spring sunshine, the chance to bond with the dogs and, as always in the first few hours of any assignment, busily computing how much pay we had coming at the end of our 16 days. It was only after a good two hours, as we turned for home, that it dawned on us we hadn’t a clue where the hell we were. We couldn’t even find the right gate out of the park, much less the road we wanted or the house itself.

Of course by this time the owners, en route to an archaeological dig somewhere in North Africa, were busy checking in their shovels at Heathrow and the house was completely empty. In any case we hadn’t thought to bring the phone number, we didn’t know the address, and since we’d only been there about half an hour before setting out with the dogs, we couldn’t even agree on the name of the people where we were staying. As we trudged blindly up and down various park perimeter roads we initially saw the funny side of things but as the afternoon began to turn cool and dark so did our moods. We gave ourselves another fruitless half hour and then admitted defeat. Under the reproachful and by now slightly apprehensive gaze of two tired and hungry Dalmatians, we found a phone box and dialled Animal Aunts, ready to confess everything in exchange for directions home.

Listening to the phone ring the other end I was suddenly startled by frantic tapping on the phone box window and there was Maria pointing at an ancient brick wall across the road. Fixed to a solid wooden gate set into the wall was one of those faux-rustic looking ceramic nameplates. You know the ones. They usually have painted wildflowers or trees decorating the edges, along with some idyllic rural motif such as a plump cock pheasant, a well-groomed badger or a deep chestnut fox picking his way through a buttercup-strewn meadow.

These plaques are probably produced by the million in China where bemused factory workers must leaf in vain through their Chinese- English dictionaries trying to make sense of the names. Some, especially when adorning ordinary, modern houses just a few feet from thundering traffic on a busy main road, suggest delusions of grandeur with their Great Oaks, Woodlands View, Badger Hollow or The Ridings. Others are more obscure and probably equally baffling to native speakers of English and Chinese. What to make, for example, of Pound Piece, Rubbles, The Stooks, Wrynecks and the one we were now gazing at with such delight, Farthing Round? About six hours earlier we’d seen that same sign and gleefully, if childishly, chorused together Farting Around! We’d found the house.

As I hurriedly replaced the phone I thought how good it was again to be part of the crazy world of Animal Aunts, an organisation we fondly imagine to be the canine and feline equivalent ofMI-6. We had had such fun working for this zany outfit on and off during the first two years of our travels that we were planning to return for a 10-month stint of interesting animals and their even more interesting owners. In those first couple of years we mostly shuttled between New Zealand, Australia and England, with a few juicy side trips along the way. We were lucky to have dual British and New Zealand citizenship and passports, giving us equal easy access to the Antipodes and Europe. But while we’d been very happy spinning round the world this way, the arrival of our precious green cards opened up vast new horizons in the United States.

We’d worked for a few months at American summer camps straight after leaving New Zealand and had loved the place. And the people, who were certainly a different breed from the British, the Kiwis and the Aussies. For example, where else in the world could a 300-pound Vietnamese pot-bellied pig travel with its owner in the first-class section of a commercial airliner? That’s what Charlotte was able to do on a six- hour flight from Philadelphia to Seattle, much to the delight of headline writers who wheeled out all the usual hammy stuff about pigs being able to fly. It seems Charlotte was given airline clearance after she was described by her owner as a therapeutic companion pet, like a guide dog. The owners apparently even claimed they had a doctor’s note requiring them to fly with their equivalent of a seeing-eye pig.

Charlotte, basking in the luxury of the first-class cabin, reportedly snoozed most of the way and was better behaved than many rock stars in similar circumstances. Until, that is, the plane was on the tarmac in Seattle. Then all hell and the pig broke loose. According to an incident report, Charlotte, squealing loudly, charged through the plane, alarming the other 200 non-porcine passengers. After trying to get into the cockpit she finally went to ground in the galley where she refused to budge until tempted out with food. It seems pigs will indeed eat anything, even airline meals. But the best part of the story came a month later when an official federal aviation investigation cleared the airline and the pig of any wrongdoing. Investigators concluded the non-discrimination on the basis of disability in air travel rules had been observed, a finding which meant Charlotte was cleared for take-off again. How could you fail to love a country that can come up with stufflike that? We’d had a taste of America and we wanted more. A lot more…

YEAR THREE

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success ofthose we don ‘t like?

—-Jean Cocteau, French writer, artist andfilm director

1

We left New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, bound for Los Angeles on the night of October 11 and arrived in California, after an 11 l/2-hour flight, at lunchtime the same day, such are the wonders of modern travel. Someone had given us the name of their American air hostess friend who lived in LA and assured us we need only ring her and we would be picked up, shown the sights and provided with beds for a couple of nights. But when we called her from the airport it was obvious she hadn’t read the same script. She sounded busy and hassled and basically in no mood to play nursemaid to a couple of stray Kiwis. Not expecting such a cool reception we didn’t really have a plan B, so on a whim we hopped a shuttle going to Venice Beach and checked into a cheap and fairly basic hostel. By now we were hot and sweaty so we dumped our stuff, changed into shorts and T-shirts and headed for the beach.

Venice Beach on a Sunday afternoon is something else. It’s hard to say what exactly, but definitely something else. Apparently this was once quite a fashionable resort—Charlie Chaplin used to hang out at the art deco Cadillac Hotel—but today it has gone to pot…and, by the look of it, to just about every other drug, deviation, excess and eccentricity known to man. This is where thousands of California’s weird and wacky gather to see and be seen, and the resulting Sunday afternoon parade of weirdos is truly wondrous to behold. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours, many wearing few clothes but with lots of tattoos and pieces of metal dangling from their extremities. Rollerblades are optional unless you intend to play an instrument, sing, juggle or eat fire, in which case they’re compulsory. Having stripped down to our two fine pairs of freckled and translucent British legs, I felt we blended in with the crowd rather well.

Impromptu drumming groups were scattered around on the beach. These seemed to attract a lot of hippie-like young girls who danced sensuously and unselfconsciously to the hypnotic beat. The same groups coincidentally attracted a disproportionate number of pot-bellied, dishevelled old men who joined in the dancing but whose interest did not seem to lie primarily in the music. While there was little room for ambiguity about their sexual intentions, the same could not be said for most people. Indeed, it was often impossible to do more than make a rough guess at the sex—let alone the sexual preferences—of many of those strutting their stuff along the Pacific seaboard that Sunday. At least when we got to the muscle beach, a kind of open-air gym on the sand, there was little doubt about the sexual orientation of those pumping iron before a crowd of goggle-eyed male admirers.

We spent a sleepless night in our doss house. Right beneath our window seemed to be the exact spot for everyone to stop and discuss their sex lives in technicolour detail or else dispense with the talk and simply get right down to it. We lay awake listening to the most lurid accounts while a succession of annoying background noises ensured sleep was not an option. These included a berserk dog barking its head off right next door, a guy who took from about 2.30am until 3am to coax his ancient VW van into a tight parking space below our window, and finally a tramp who methodically worked his way through several dumpsters right outside the hostel. Each little episode was also accompanied by an earthy commentary from a fellow lodger a couple of rooms away who spent the night rushing to his window to inform all and sundry that if they didn’t effing well eff offhe’d effing call the effing cops. In fact, wailing sirens and the gentle thud of hickory nightstick meeting skull were about the only sounds we didn’t hear that night.

Next morning we jammed ourselves and all our luggage onto two crowded buses heading downtown. We must have caused some disruption and discomfort for other passengers, who were all either black or Latino, but nobody seemed to mind. We had to stand most of the way through the grimy suburbs of Los Angeles to the bus station where we caught a Greyhound to Las Vegas. The coach was delayed more than an hour because of road works which gave us a chance to savour another slice of life in America—the wheeling, dealing sub-culture of the LA bus station. In the short time we were there we saw just about everything being bought and sold, from sex to socks, and from drugs to dodgy watches. We sat there clutching our bags, pretending not to notice anything, trying like hell to avoid eye contact with everyone, surprised and perhaps a little intimidated at suddenly finding ourselves part of a white minority amid a chaotic mass of mostly dark-skinned people.

The trip to Las Vegas took six or seven hours, much of it in darkness, the tedium of the journey being greatly relieved by passing a structure we were reliably informed was the world’s largest thermometer. Another mind-numbing first to add to such incongruous Australian icons as the Big Pineapple, the Big Cow, the Big Sheep…and the Giant Prawn, which adorns a commercial rooftop in the otherwise unremarkable New South Wales coastal town ofBallina. We were still in a state of high old excitement over that thermometer as the coach pulled into Vegas in all its night-time neon glory. Room rates in Vegas change almost nightly so it’s a bit of a lottery when, like us, you’re searching for the cheapest bed. We tried a few places before stumbling across Monday night specials at the Sahara which offered double rooms for $39. Of course, accommodation and food are relatively cheap in Vegas where the first priority is simply to lure punters through the door. After that they reckon they can always part the fools from their

money at the gambling tables and slot machines. And in our case they were absolutely right.

By the time we had checked in and sorted ourselves out in our room it was about midnight but, despite the previous disturbed night, neither of us felt like going to bed. Instead we wandered downstairs and found ourselves engulfed in several acres of full-on flashing, ringing, hooting, whistling slot machines. At that hour the place was still crowded and we joined the throng, pushing our steadily diminishing supply of dimes and quarters into scores of hungry mouths. We must have hit a few payouts because we were still there four hours later. However, one of the things—perhaps the only thing—that kept us going was the supply of free drinks. We found just playing the 10-cent machines entitled us to any drink we wanted, served by a bevy of well- used waitresses who appeared to me ever more alluring as the night and the drinks wore on.

We finally fell into bed and slept through until 11.30 that morn- ing—which meant we had to get up, get packed and get going in a frantic rush to beat the noon check-out deadline. We were moving like good budget travellers because the room rates were going up again that night whereas a little way away, at Circus Circus, Tuesday tariffs had dropped to a very acceptable $29. All the casinos in Vegas seem to have some theme or other and at Circus Circus it was, naturally, a circus. I haven’t got much time for circuses generally but what we saw of this one was particularly pathetic, the performers being mostly very sedentary and unenthusiastic cats and dogs.

It was about this time we made our first big mistake—if you don’t count coming to Las Vegas in the first place and losing a fistful of dollars the previous night. Vegas is first and foremost a city of the night. After dark everything in this neon wonderland lights up and twinkles so radiantly that this is the only city on Earth visible to people on Pluto as they sit out on their porches in the early evening. However, we decided to take a walk along the Strip at lunchtime in the baking heat of the Nevada desert. We kept having to crawl inside the cavernous air- conditioned casinos along the route and suck down a constant stream of cold drinks but even so we were both nursing raging headaches within an hour. Unable to face the long walk back, we grabbed a cab to our hotel and sank into blissful cool sleep for a few hours. When we emerged again it was dark and the Strip greeted us with its usual glitzy, gaudy, completely over-the-top embrace.

The casinos in Vegas are huge monuments to money and bad taste; it’s as if each new one that opens—and they do still seem to be springing up at an incredible rate—is trying to outdo the last in terms of tackiness. Size certainly matters here and most of these places are enormous. We tried to pop into as many of them as we could and were grudgingly impressed by the sheer scale of everything, especially in places like Caesar’s Palace, Luxor, MGM Grand and New York, New York. Their never-ending challenge is to tug at the public sleeve and try to persuade people through the door. At the Mirage they found it helped to have a volcano erupting periodically outside while inside, between losing bets, customers could marvel at a rain forest, a pair of rare white tigers or a huge fish tank containing baby sharks. We were in Vegas just a couple of days before the official opening of the latest mega-casino which eclipsed all others to date in terms of superlatives. However, another handful were scheduled to open within a year or two, so Bellagio is probably old hat by now.

Bellagio was reportedly a $1.6 billion (that’s right, BILLION) project which turned a few heads even in Vegas where the locals reckon they’ve pretty much seen it all before. As you might expect for such serious money, the place was ridiculously large and lavish. The complex included a hotel with about 3,000 rooms, nine first-class restaurants, a $96 million theatre plus an art gallery which was home to the works of such masters as Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Gau- gin…and Andy Warhol. Guests could make use of two wedding chapels, a grand ballroom, indulge in a little retail therapy in some of the world’s most upscale shops or, of course, gamble at any of the 2,700 slot machines, 30 poker tables or 139 other gaming tables. It took a staff of more than 9,000 to run all this, among them 115 full-time gardeners.

If it all became too much for the guests they could always sit quietly by the eight-acre lake which fronted the complex. Although, this being Las Vegas, it’s no ordinary lake…at regular intervals it is transformed into the Fountains ofBellagio, a $52 million spectacle oflight, music and wonderfully choreographed dancing water. During our brief visit they were putting the system through its paces a few final times before the grand opening. We watched from behind a chain netting security fence as about 200 yards of fountains, jets and water canons sprayed and swayed and swivelled in time to the music. There’s no denying it, these little country bumpkins were pretty impressed. The computer-controlled fountains performed their exotic ballet routines to everything from Lionel Ritchie to Italian opera to such classics as Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain. The end result was one of the great shows in town, open to everyone and, best of all, completely free.

Next day we hired a car. We had hoped to avoid this additional expense by taking advantage of a car relocation scheme known as driveaway. This typically involves people moving house, going on vacation or on a business transfer who need someone to deliver a car for them. There’s usually plenty of room for a couple of people plus