Which, I guess, is where the adventure really begins, transcontinental flight and all.
The Critical Reader might be inclined to question Hughesy's bed time the night before, and I wasn't overly confident about it myself. But I'd been close to nodding off on the train up, and TransLink told me I needed to be on the platform at Roma Street in time for the 6:27 AirTrain.
I was awake again just before midnight, and at two and three, so one might surmise the sleep had been fitful.
On the other hand, given the vividness of dreams covering a variety of topics, most of them of nightmarish proportions rather than the pleasant thoughts I employ while trying to drop off, I must have slept fairly well.
And fairly long. It was around four-fifteen when I finally surfaced, more or less what it would have been at home, though there wasn't the hour and a half or so on the computer before the morning walk.
Instead, there was a shower, a realignment of the contents of the Coppertone Container, about three-quarters of an hour's Travelogue tapping, and a final onceover of the goods and chattels before heading downstairs to check out almost on the dot of six.
The AirTrain hit platform six at Roma Street right on time, checkin was open when Hughesy hit the terminal, and, as a result, the details are right up to date just before seven-fifty-five.
Just the way you like things when you're in the Travelogue tapping trade and you've polished off breakfast.
Better still, he tapped as he drained the last of the coffee, with Gate 41 almost in sight (it's over there, just on the other side of the Sushi Sushi operation) I'm sitting at a bench boasting five double-sided power points.
On that basis, by the time one heads off for the regulation nervous pee ten minutes before boarding, we'll have two devices sitting on more than 100% ahead of five hours in the air.
And not a Ladies' toilet in sight.
Around 10 minutes before boarding was due to commence I took myself down to date 41, where is the number of people seated in the departure lounge was significantly less the number of seats.
That, predictably, raised notions of relatively uncrowded flights that may have prompted the merging of the lunchtime flight I had booked with an early departure.
Those matters gave me something to ponder during the regulation nervous pee, but when I return from the depths there were plenty of people standing around the gates and the numbers continue to grow.
By the time they were ready to start zapping boarding passes it looked like before it would be reasonably close to full, and it was.
Still, I ended up with a vacant seat beside 15 F, which meant there was a bit more room to sort out the odds and ends in the backpack before takeoff.
Back when I had booked I had some visions of taking in views of the red centre, and which ever one of Simpson’s or Sturt’s Stony Deserts lay under our flight path.
I had forgotten that row 15 would almost certainly be looking out over the wing.
But those matters became academic.
We took off to the east, circled back over the top or Brisbane airport, looped on to a westward track and headed into the regulation cloud mass as we headed up to cruising altitude.
That was okay, I reckoned, since it was summer and there was rain about. The cloud would possibly dissipate as we reached drier inland areas.
I was on the sunny side of the plane, so I rested my eyes for awhile in anticipation of whatever foodstuffs were moving on the horizon. While I’d already demolished a reasonably substantial breakfast I figured the topping up with something that had already been paid for would stave off the necessity of lunch.
And, in any case, once I was on the ground in Perth I had more important of fish to fry than a quest for something to keep me going until dinnertime.
The Virgin breakfast, when it arrived turned out to be slightly subpar scrambled eggs with accompanying hashbrowns which turned out to be very close two double bogey territory.
And a yoghurt, which I have never eaten it wasn't about to start.
The apple juice that turned up 10 minutes later was the best part of the package, but the whole thing did what needed to be done.
By that point, well over an hour into the flight I figured that I may have had some content for a touch of trouble tapping, but the glance out of the window revealed a scenic expanse of wing with a fairly nondescript inland landscape beyond it.
Not much to tap about there, folks.
So I turned my attention to James Lee Burke, knocking over the rest of his latest masterpiece, The Jealous Kind. In that his usual inimitable fashion, Burke has managed to take a fairly non-descript starting point (girl ditches boy friend at the drive-in in Houston Texas in the early 1950s) and works it up into a turmoil of revenge, counterstroke, and moral mayhem.
That's fairly easy to do when the protagonist is a descendent of the dysfunctional Holland clan with the genetic predisposition to antisocial tendencies and the personal foibles that come with the ancestry.
Burke wraps up the story with a neat conclusion that is possibly as close as he is ever going to get to and they all lived happily ever after.
Well, the Holland descendant and the girl do, any way, as do the hooker who turns out to have a heart of all those gold and the only honest cop in the Houston police force.
Turning the virtual pages on the iPad kept me busy for much of the remainder of the flight, through the patch of turbulence that came when we entered another mass of cloud somewhere around Lake Eyre.
It persisted almost all the way across the Nullarbor, according do my regular glances out of the window, but by the time I had reached the almost happy ending, it was mostly gone and we seemed to work dropped considerably in altitude.
It wasn't that long afterwards when we started receiving the obligatory advice about large electronic devices and the impending illumination of the seatbelt sign.
The good news from the pilot just prior to landing was that we were running around half an hour early, which raised prospects of an earlier collection of the new laptop that was waiting for me at the Apple Store in Perth.
Those prospects seemed to evaporate once I had headed out of the terminal in search of the city shuttlebus. They seem to depart on the hour, but they depart from terminal three, the one allocated two full fare domestic services. Understandable, I guess.
What I couldn't understand, however, was a lengthy delay outside the international terminal that took us well past one o'clock, followed by a run out onto the freeway that delivers travellers into Perth and a U-turn at a convenient flyover that took us all the way back to the airport.
It seemed there were roadworks in between the international terminal and terminal three but no one had bothered to take transport shuttles between the two into account.
And that one particular traveller had failed to take the rivalry between bus services into account.
When we reached terminal three, the bus driver pointed me one way, which turned out to be the stop for the common or garden Perth bus service rather than the $15 into the city shuffle.
I was still somewhat confused when a 935 bus arrived, and the attempt to pay for the ticket produced a response along the lines of I'm running late, don't worry about it now, fix it up later.
We were stopped at a set of traffic lights about five minutes later, obviously having picked up a bit of time, when he pointed out that there was a quicker, more direct option if I alighted at the next stop.
On the other hand, I was already on service that was already headed in the right direction, so I expressed a willingness to stay.
And, interestingly, staying delivered me to the bottom end of Barrack Street around the time the $15 shuttle wouldn't have been leaving the airport and delivered me there at what we used to call the right price.
It's not that far from where I alighted at Stirling Gardens to the Adina Apartment Hotel at the other end of Barrack Street, what the walk had me questioning a few assumptions about what we would be doing over the next day or two.
Not to put too fine a point on it, with tomorrow’s temperature range from 19 to 37, followed by 22 to 39 on Thursday walking was no longer part of the medium term scenario.
In fact, if I didn't have to walk to the Apple Store this afternoon, I would probably have ensconced myself in the Adina conducting a thorough investigation of the air conditioning.
And there's an additional complication. Amid all the other planning I had it conveniently neglected to note that Thursday 26 January was, of course, Australia Day.
Given a maximum of 39 and public holiday crowds plans for a walk around the historic precincts in Fremantle have to disappeared towards the back burner.
But that was a concern for the future.
The first priority was to get my hands on the new laptop so as soon as I had settled in I was back on Barrack Street, turning it right onto Hay bound directly for the Apple Store, which turned out to be a bit further or than anticipated.
That ruled out and investigation of the little cluster of eateries away on the other side of the Apple Store. Tom's Kitchen, where I’d had and excellent coq au vin last time was long gone but, according to distant memory, there was a cluster of interesting eateries along the same laneway or in the same arcade, so I was half interested to find out what, if anything, remained.
Now, with the Apple store further than I thought, there was an abundance of interesting places to eat located much closer to base. I wasn't going to get to all those, so I figured there it wasn't much point in adding to the list.
And, of course, I wanted to get my hands on the new laptop.
So, once I transferred at those notions into the too hard basket, I tracked back to the big Apple, which proved to be a hive of activity.
So much so, In fact, that it took me a good five minutes to be noticed among the general hubbub.
But once I was, things flowed smoothly.
I walked out some forty minutes later with the new MacBook Air all set up and ready to go with news that, back home, the supervisor had shelled out for an iPhone.
And about time, too.
As is almost invariably the case, the walk back to the Adina seemed to take about half the time of the upward leg and it wasn't long before I had the new box and dice unpacked and ready to go.
That was when I made and important discovery. I had loaded several important odds and ends, various software packages and the old document that wasn't sitting on iCloud onto a thumb drive, which was still sitting in the appropriate slot of my desktop iMac on the other side of the continent.
So I needed a copy of Grammarly, the flavoured proof reading application, a copy of iBooks Author, the software I use to put together website pages, as well as the extension that allows would-be authors to dictate content directly into Pages without having it ping-pong back and forth over the Internet.
I figured the in-house wi-fi at the Adina wouldn't like that at all.
As it turned out, it didn't like the new laptop trying to sync itself into iCloud at the same time as Hughesy was trying to download all this additional stuff.
Consequently, it embarked on a go slow campaign which reduced everything to crawl.
By the stage it was just after five and someone who had the skipped lunch, despite one and a half breakfasts, was feeling decidedly peckish.
I suppose I could have left the Adina broadband to do its thing and see how far it had proceeded when I returned, but I figured I was better off shutting things down temporarily, heading out to eat, and resuming the process on my return.
Apart from rising hunger pangs there was a very good reason for heading towards an early dinner. Long Chim, my preferred destination, is an operation in the David Thomson chain specialising in Thai street food that I was led to believe does not take bookings.
Like Spice I Am in Sydney, where experience suggests it is advisable to turn it up right on opening time if you don't want to spend time standing in a queue.
As it turns out, Long Chim has significantly more seating, and was nowhere near crowded when I logged on the doorstep just after five.
Given a choice of where I preferred to sit, I ended up at the bar, looking across what seemed to be the salad and garnish preparation area into the kitchen.
Long Chim is one of those places best visited in company with a reasonable sized party, a fairly well stocked wallet or credit card, and an inclination towards adventure in the chilli department.
That’s not, as the friendly waitress pointed out, to suggest that everything on offer verges of the incendiary. But the heat is there if you want it, and the wait staff know what is hot and what is not.
I opted to start beef skewers and pork sausages from the entree selection with a glass of the La Violetta Ye-Ye Grise, a riesling-trainer blend from Great Southern. That was the suggestion after the original request for a straight Riesling produced a sorry all gone.
And maybe it was just as well.
The wine-food combination worked brilliantly, the beef skewers were excellent, and the pork sausages a couple of centimetres short of outstanding.
At least, that's the way my palate felt about it.
I suppose I could have stopped there but I followed it with a green curry of chicken, steamed rice and a glass of French Vouvray chenin blanc, again at the wait person's suggestion and emerged with the credit card reeling just before six.
I was an extremely happy camper as I made my way back up Barrack Street, diverted into a handy BWS en route to pick up liquid supplies to tide me over the next two and a bit days.
I wouldn't be needing much with a Bruce concert tomorrow night, so I restricted myself do a six pack of Coopers, a Vickery Riesling and a Chapel Hill Sangiovese.
While I must admit BWS is usually well out of my territory (no outlet in Bowen for a start) I was mildly surprised to note bottles of Grosset Polish Hill and Springvale Riesling among the chilled whites.
I'm sure that if I looked more closely there would have been other surprises but I had what I needed and wasn't inclined to spend anything extra on what may well have turned out to be superfluous alcohol that needed to be lugged to Adelaide and points beyond.
Back in the hotel room, I enjoyed a chilled article (actually, two) while I watched and waited for software updates and downloads to do their respective things.
Eventually, drooping eyelids forced me to retire for the night before the process was complete.
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