Riiiiiight … So we get to the airport shuttle bus stop in downtown Auckland and wait for the bus. Which is supposed to stop by every 20 minutes, but does not appear until about 45 minutes later. OK, we’re still OK, we’ll just get to the airport 2 hours before flight time, still plenty of time. Then we finally arrive at the airport, and take care of a few necessities (like picking up the stored luggage and returning the rented cell phone) before getting in the checkin line with our luggage … behind a just-arrived busload of Japanese tourists. The line took an hour for us to get through. By the time we got our bags checked in, it was already boarding time, and we hadn’t even cleared security yet! Fortunately, NZ has very little flight security (attention terrorists, here’s your new vacation spot! oh wait, NZ stayed out of the Iraq folly) so we flew through security. Twice — we got rejected by the first passport check because we hadn’t paid the “Oh You Want To Leave That Will Be Twenty Five Dollars Please” exit fee. We did get to the gate with time to spare … specifically, 10 seconds. No kidding, we waited for 10 seconds before they called our row and we went in. Oh, and Chris and his big laptop bag got pulled aside for a random search by security! Yay!
During the long oceanic flight, Chris plowed through Juno (middling thumbs up), Control (middling thumbs up), and American Gangster (thumbs down), and decided that no movie can really be any good on that little screen, especially if it has dialogue that you need to actually hear. Also it was no help that the Ugly American behind us had a jowl-rattling snore that would wake the dead. Sharon rewatched Flight of the Conchords episodes again. That show is crack to her, apparently.
In San Francisco we got our bags, got through customs with blazing speed, rechecked the bags, and got Chris’s tickets corrected (did we mention that United had screwed up Chris’s US tickets?) Then had a little bit of time to sit and do internet work (thank you SFO for your excellent wifi) including the post that precedes this one. Then back on the plane …
In Denver we didn’t have to hassle with our bags since they were now checked through to Atlanta, so were able to finally sit down to some righteously greasy food and do some idle people watching. We sat next to a most surreal family from Brooklyn, ask us about it sometime. With another hour to kill, we then settled in at the gate for more idle reading and internet goofing (including hopefully this post), but discovered that Denver’s wifi is terrible. Instead of making you pay for it, it’s free, BUT it’s ad supported. How they actually insert the advertising uses a technical mechanism that breaks many websites, including that of this blog. And the signal was too weak to be usable anyway. Hooray.
In Atlanta, finally, we had to wait about an hour for our bags, but they showed up and that’s all that mattered at that point. Taxi ride, key in door, home! Hi cats! 2 am. 35 hours awake.