h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I flew with around twenty others to Australia at the behest of Her Majesty - something to do with big bombs. Our party left Britain in the midst of a 1950's vicious winter. We were all told to pack away our winter kit, because we would be going via the Middle east. After a bitter night spent in Wiltshire, kept warm by burning the furniture of an unused next door hut, off we went - first stop Iceland. You Guest?
The snow over Iceland lay deep and picturesque. funny, it didn't seem as cold as Wiltshire. We encountered really crippling winter weather in Nova Scotia. At Montreal our trusty Hastings, in the midst of a night time tempest landed short of the runway - talk about bouncy castle. In Omaha the hotel was comfortable but sleep impossible amid the continuing wail of police patrol car sirens.
Our aircraft seemed fine when we rose off the tarmac near San Francisco, half way between there and Honolulu however I looked out and saw all of the port outer propeller - it had abandonned its whirling motion. The sea looked more than choppy as we lightened load by jettisoning fuel. After returning to Frisco, we waited a fortnight for a replacement engine to arrive from blighty.
Eventually we did get to Honolulu. From there we flew to a hot dot in the pacific, a small island surrounded by a transparent blue sea, where the Hastings refuelled and got pointed in the direction of Fiji. On Christmas Island we were plagued by diarrhea and by a ground cover of sidling big crabs - we had to watch where we placed our feet as we ran for the loo. At Cairns we were sprayed with disinfectant then the low level flight to Adelaide was something to write home about
The trip took two months.