I’ve always been a cat man. I used to rescue and adopt every stray kitty that wandered up to my house. After he started hanging around my back door, I once spent months taming a really mean, really ugly feral cat. As soon as we lopped his nuts off Bob turned out to be the sweetest house cat ever. 

I never wanted a dog. I didn’t even particularly like dogs. I still wouldn’t have one if Jamie hadn’t demanded that we get one.

Now I realize and admit to the error of my ways. 

When Jamie saw little Tinker’s photo on a dog rescue website she said, “Look at that face. There’s something special about this one. She looks spunky.”

I know you love your dog and think it is special. But no matter what you may think, he or she does not compare to our little Tinker. Tinker’s never met a person she doesn’t love. Instead of barking at our mailman, she takes him a toy every day when he arrives at our front door. She’s never bitten anyone. Never dug a hole in the yard. Never chewed on anything she wasn’t supposed to chew. Never peed in the house. Never growled at anyone. In fact, she doesn’t even know how to growl and it’s kind of funny on those very rare occasions when she tries. She even tries to groom our cat.

Despite this lengthy list of attributes, and despite our love for little Tinker, she will not be accompanying us to Australia. 

Why?

Well, how much do you think it might cost to ship a 9-pound dog to Australia? Let’s pretend this is The Price Is Right. Closest guess without going over the actual price wins. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go wash the dishes while you think it over. Ready? Begin cogitating.

(PAUSE) 

OK, I’m back. The dishes have all been washed and dried and put away and you’ve had plenty of time to think about the question I asked.

What was your guess? 

A thousand dollars?

Two thousand?

Five thousand?

Because we thought it would be fun to take her with us, I contacted two companies that specialize in shipping dogs overseas. 

We didn’t have a clue as to the actual cost and we initially guessed that it might cost a couple thousand dollars. Although that seemed expensive, it was a cost we were willing to bear just for the pleasure of having little Tinker with us.

Oh, how wrong we were.

The company that had received the highest recommendations sent me a detailed estimate for one-way shipping. (One way because they ship pets only to Australia. We would then need to find an Aussie company to ship her back to Texas.)

Are you sitting down? If not, please do because the cost I’m about to give you is so outrageously high that it caused blood to rush from my head, nearly causing me to faint. Please take reasonable precautions prior to reading the next paragraph. 

The cost to ship little 9-pound Tinker was $9,500. One way. 

The detailed cost breakdown included items such as “Take dog out of shipping cage to pee at LAX. $175.” Putting her back in her cage after she peed was another $75 line item.

But $9,500 was not the final cost. The fine print in the contract specified that it did not include a number of additional required items. 

I’m going to to take a wild-assed guess that the total cost of shipping her from Dallas to Sydney would probably end up somewhere around $12,000. And as I said, that’s a one-way cost. Although the return trip is far simpler, an Aussie company estimated that the return trip would cost an additional $5,000. And I’m pretty damn sure that was merely the base price and that a number of those pesky unspecified extras would eventually be added to the bill.

Do the math: $12,000 plus $5,000 plus a list of unspecified additional costs equals somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000.

In case I have not made myself clear, we love little Tinker. She is the sweetest, most lovable dog in the world. 

But we don’t love her $20,000 worth. 

So Tinker will be spending the next six months with Bob and Jan, good friends who live a couple blocks down the street from us. They are the nicest people in the world and he’s a retired veterinarian, so we know she’ll be in very good hands.

Bon voyage, little Tinker. We’ll miss you.

Most JimandJamie.com readers stopped reading the blog when we finally returned to Texas after covid stranded us in Australia for a couple extra months. They reasonably concluded that a travel blog would end when our travels ended. But unlike most years, I continued writing. Some were advertising stories, some were family stories, some even covered our travels within Texas and the other United States.

If you’d like to go back and read some of the stories you missed, you can click on the story summaries or just keep scrolling down the page and click on “Next Page” at the bottom of the page to keep going.

Here are some of my personal favorites from the last two years:

Hollywood, circa 1983: The biggest star I ever worked with

McKinney, Texas: One degree of separation from The King of Pop, Part One

McKinney, Texas: One degree of separation from the King of Pop, Part Two

McKinney, Texas: A passion for fashion

Fiji, circa 1993: One man’s fish is another man’s poison, Part One

Fiji, circa 1993: One man’s fish is another man’s poison, Part Two

Fiji, circa 1993: One man’s fish is another man’s poison, Part Three

Buena Park, California, circa 1993: Doing what I can to help America’s impressionable youth

Los Angeles, California, circa 1999: A tale of double doppelgängers

McKinney, Texas: A double dose of doppelgängers

McKinney, Texas: Twenty-two years and counting

McKinney, Texas: The cat who loves TV

McKinney, Texas: Another one degree of separation from Bill Gates story

Lakewood, California, circa 1971: The most beautiful little girl in the world

Phoenix, Arizona, circa 1975: Run the risk of being noticed

Irvine, California, circa 1977: How my farmer father became a supermodel

Colton, California, circa 1941: The most shocking incident in deYong family history

McKinney, Texas: My Whoopi Goldberg story

Ashgabad, Turkmenistan: Closing The Gates of Hell

Kalispell, Montana, circa 1974: The tale of Playboy bunny

Cairns, Queensland, Australia, 1991: Pucker up, buttercup

Somewhere in Alaska, circa 1936: Working on the railroad all the live long day

San Luis Obispo, California, 2005: The woman with the giant head

McKinney, Texas: How to make sure you have a happy Thanksgiving

San Francisco, California, 1983: More Larrys than a Chinese phonebook

Loma Linda, California: California in the rear view mirror

McKinney, Texas: “Ronnie, honey, baby, sweetie, I’m gonna make you a star.”

McKinney, Texas: Tawny Kitaen, my longtime girlfriend, passes away

McKinney, Texas: The time I kissed Bill Gates’ girlfriend

McKinney, Texas: Big as a Louisville Slugger

McKinney, Texas: Huckleberry Chuck signs off

Amarillo, Texas: American Stonehenge

Tensed, Idaho: The town named after my typical condition

Athens, Texas: The tour of European Texas towns continues

Paris, Texas: Bonjour, y’all

McKinney, Texas: Beautiful downtown McKinney

McKinney, Texas: The face of an angel, a delicate porcelain doll

My apologies to the Vapors, whose 1980 hit “I Think I’m Turning Japanese” was the number one song in Australia, but only climbed as high as number thirty-nine in the United States. I swear this will all start to make sense a few paragraphs from now. 

But let’s set this up wth a trip back to Irvine, California, circa 1994. 

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve had several Japanese girlfriends in the past. That’s how I happened to add a few very basic Japanese words to my vocabulary.

I knew that “hai” meant “yes.”

That “konnichiwa” meant “hello.”

That “domo arigato gozaimasu” is the formal way of saying “thank you.” But one of the Japanese girlfriends taught me that it often gets shortened to just plain “domo” in everyday conversation.

And, finally, I knew that “sukoshi” means “a little” (it’s the root of the American word “skosh” as in “I’d like a skosh more.”)

That’s it. My Japanese vocabulary consisted of four words.

(Truth be told, I knew a smattering of other words in Japanese. For example, I knew that besuboru meant baseball. I knew that hakujin meant white guy. That nihonjin meant Japanese person. That mizu meant water. And that gaijin meant foreigner.)

In those days, our ad agency had a very prominent Japanese client. He was a very cool guy who had been born in Japan, but had grown up in America. He ran the American branch of his family’s multibillion dollar multinational conglomerate. I was in the lobby one day bullshitting with our receptionist when he finished a meeting in our conference room. He passed through the lobby and as he opened the door to leave he paused, turned to me and said, “You guys are doing great work for us.”

“Domo,” I responded.

He was shocked. Absolutely shocked. His eyes widened in surprise and his mouth dropped open. “How do you know to say, ‘Domo?’ he asked. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Skoshi,” I replied.

He was very impressed and mistakenly assumed I knew far more than I was admitting to. 

If I’m being absolutely honest, the secret to success in advertising is the opposite of the secret to success in any other business. Other businesses require someone to have a deep understanding of a specific subject, but in advertising the secret to success is knowing just enough about any particular subject to fake it. You need to learn a little bit about a lot of subjects, but you don’t need to become an expert in any of them. Your knowledge level about any client’s product is like Mark Twain’s description of the Mississippi River: It’s a mile wide and an inch deep. If you’re handling a dozen different clients in a dozen different industries, it’s impossible to become deeply knowledgeable about all of them. You might be writing an ad about hamburgers one day, guitars the next day, and semiconductors the day after that. You learn just enough to get by.

And that brings us to yesterday’s Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Sydney. The service was incredible. The Japan Airlines flight attendants were truly unbelievable. They wanted nothing more than to take care of us and to do everything within their powers to please us. They made it one of the best flights we’ve ever taken. They doted on us. They bowed constantly. One of the flight attendants came to us just before we landed. She stood beside us, gave us a polite bow, and told us how much she had enjoyed serving us.

“Domo,” I responded.

Her reaction was identical to the reaction of my Japanese client thirty years earlier. 

She was shocked. Absolutely shocked. Her eyes widened in surprise and her mouth dropped open. “How do you know to say, ‘Domo?’ she asked. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Skoshi,” I replied.

“Yes, you speak Japanese,” she said enthusiastically. “You speak Japanese.” She could not have been more pleased.

So consider this an expert travel tip. Fake it. Learn a few basic words in a foreign language and you can convince a native speaker that you are fluent in their language. Or at least to convince them that you put in enough effort to learn the basics. And that will make them very, very happy.

And as a special bonus, you will be well on your way to success as an advertising copywriter.

Shame on me. This is supposed to be a travel blog, but I somehow neglected to mention that today we’re beginning our first long trip, our first international trip in more than two years. We’re leaving Texas this morning and flying to Sydney, Australia.

Here’s our route map. 

Not quite as simple as it sounded, is it?

Why, you may ask, are we stopping in Tokyo instead of flying direct to Sydney? And on the return trip, why are we stopping in Jakarta and Tokyo instead of flying direct to Dallas?

Here’s the answer.

I’ve made a career out of accumulating frequent flier points. Jamie and I pay for everything with our airline credit cards. And I mean everything. At one extreme, we paid for her car with that credit card. At the other extreme, I often use the same credit card to buy items so inexpensive that I could easily have paid for them with the spare change in my pocket. If the credit card company offers a special bonus for certain activity, I immediately sign up and do whatever is necessary to accumulate those bonus points. And I once had a client who paid me in frequent flier points. As a result of these machinations, we have stacked up somewhere north of 2,500,000 points.

Enough, we thought, to last us the rest of our lives.

In the past we have flown business class to Australia and back for as little as 105,000 points. Then they raised it to 200,000 points. That, we thought, was a bit greedy of the airline, but we had plenty of points and thought, “That’s expensive, but we still have enough points to last us the rest of our lives.”

And then along came Covid, the Flu Manchu, the Asian Contagion, the Moo Goo Gai Pan Health Plan, the Chinfluenza, the Commie Cough, General Tso’s Revenge.

Want to fly business class to Australia? In an effort to separate tourists from their hard-earned frequent flier points, the airlines have jacked up the price of tickets to and from Australia. What once cost 105,000 points, and what cost just 200,000 points as recently as three years ago, now costs 750,000 points. Per person. Seriously. Seven hundred and fifty thousand points each. The 2,500,000 points we’ve accumulated, the points we thought would last for the rest of our lives, are no longer enough to buy us three business class round trips to Australia. 

If you choose to pay cash instead of points, be prepared to get screwed on that deal, too. I just looked up what Dallas-to-Sydney would cost if we were paying cash. Are you sitting down? Are you prepared to be dumbfounded?

What used to cost $7500 (sometimes much less) now costs $23,000. Each. Seriously. Twenty-three thousand dollars per person. Yes, you read that correctly. Twenty-three thousand smackeroos. Twenty-three thousand greenbacks. Twenty-three thousand clams. Twenty-three thousand simoleons. Twenty-three thousand…well, you probably get the idea. It’s outrageously freakin’ expensive.

As a result of this out-and-out airline avarice, I got on the phone and spoke to a very helpful airline representative who was a frequent flier point specialist. She helped me find a far more affordable, but far more inconvenient route (Dallas-Los Angeles-Tokyo-Sydney-Adelaide) for just 200,000 frequent flier points each. The return route is even crazier (Adelaide-Sydney-Jakarta-Tokyo-DFW).

Between flight times and layovers, what should have been a 15-hour experience has turned into a 33-hour ordeal.

But what the hell. I’m a glass half full kind of guy so I look at our three hour layover in Tokyo as a chance to visit a country we’ve never before visited. 

And since this is supposed to be a travel blog, that’s probably a good thing.