Traveling to New Zealand

First, let me start with a note about this blog. We have pictures to add to this, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out an easy way to add pictures to the middle of these entries that I have already created. The stupid program keeps inserting the pictures at the beginning and then I have to drag the pictures down, one paragraph at a time, to where I want to put them. This is stupid and I refuse to participate. Instead, I will simply create a second page with the pictures that should accompany the day. This first day of travel there weren't many pictures, but other days there were quite alot. On those days, I will only include a few pictures, just to keep everyone's eyes from bleeding.

Anyway, on with our first day of vacation.

Well, we are . . .here, sort of. It is the wee hours of the morning right now and I find myself not sleeping. Those who have never traveled west to the end of time may have a difficult time sympathizing, but just let me point out how disconcerting traveling over the date line actually is. We left Newton at 12:30 Wednesday afternoon. Our flight left at 3:05 for Dallas. (Libby just woke up and told me that she was having weird dreams about flying still—that her uncle Gary was trying to get through customs with bags full beef jerky and firecrackers. Both are very bad things to try and bring through customs. Now, for some reason, she is softly singing “Up, Up and Away” [in my beautiful balloon]. If this is what jet lag is like, then I guess it’s not so bad. Up at weird hours and doing crazy-type things is fairly entertaining at least) After the puddle jumper, we took a connecting flight to Los Angles.

Of course, when I packed my carry on baggage, I had grand designs of getting so many things done along the way. I packed the textbook for the new class I’m teaching this semester and three books to read and some notepads so I could write profound things and notes from some other writing that I wanted to sort through and get into order. In my head while I was packing, I envisioned myself catching up on hours of productive things that I had been putting off for the last few weeks, months, years. After all, I was a captive audience, what else could I do.

But, I thought to myself while I was packing, I can only be productive for so long before my eyes get tired and my brain gets bored and, after all, I am on vacation and I should enjoy myself some while we’re in the air. So I packed a portable DVD player with Season 1 of a certain series—to be discussed later—and my Gameboy with a few time-consuming role playing games. These, I told myself, would be something I could reward myself with for a job well done.

All this time, in the back of my mind, I was aware of the fact that the airlines, too, would have entertainment options on the plane, at least on the overseas flight they would. But I figured that would be easy enough to ignore and it looked like they were showing only movies that I had no interest in seeing (we got online before leaving and checked their web posting for movies).

Needless to say, I accomplished absolutely nothing productive on the flight down here. I made it about eighty pages into a David Sedaris book, but nothing else productive left my book bag. I did, however, run out the batteries on my Gameboy, iPod and DVD player. It’s amazing how, once one is actually in the air and surrounded by strangers confined to the same spot for a very long period of time, one immediately wishes to reward oneself for the “job well done” of killing time without killing people. And by “one” I, of course, mean “me.” I know people get on planes every day and conduct business. But as soon as I was on the planes, all I wanted to do was forget that I was confined on a machine that was clearly defying all of the laws of nature, and that I was sharing B.O. space with about 250 other people, and do it in a non-thinking kind of way. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

LAX, in Los Angles, is a large, confusing and mostly horrible airport. Really, you could substitute any large airport’s name into the above statement and it would be true. Airports are designed for the maximum of screwing patrons out of their money and the minimum of convenience for getting from one flight to another. Libby and I arrived with about three hours of lay-over between our flights, so we had plenty of time to wander around looking for our overseas flight. And I would have wandered around, more or less aimlessly, asking nobody where I should be going, determined to find it on my own until I only had a half hour left and then, and only then, asking for directions, but Libby, being a better traveler than I, almost immediately noticed that, despite what our boarding passes said, American Airlines sublet their New Zealand travel to Qantas and we needed to move to a completely different terminal. This took a half hour or so of toting our carry-ons through construction and various poorly labeled concourses.

After getting to the international terminal, we passed through security because we wanted to make sure that we knew where we were supposed to be. Of course this meant that we wouldn’t be coming out again without the hassle of taking off all of our clothes and bending over for the standard body-cavity search we now feel is necessary to make sure bad people aren’t sneaking nail clippers onto planes. (Speaking of which, Libby got onto the plane with a veritable arsenal of knitting needles—some of which were very long and very pointy. How is it that nail clippers are dangerous and long, stabbing objects are OK? Probably it’s a conspiracy of the Knitter’s Republic of Airline Passengers—KRAP to those on the inside, and not to be confused with the Knitter’s Union of interNational Travelers, which is full of unpleasant people) We hadn’t met up with Molly and J.F. (Libby’s sister and her husband) yet, but we figured they could find their way, what with them being experienced and worldly travelers.

Unfortunately, that meant that we had cut ourselves off from the impressive selection of restaurants and shops in the main airport and limited ourselves to the two or three piss-poor selections to choose from. Apparently, international travelers don’t need to eat, or have an inordinate amount of money to blow, because we were forced to pay $35 for two sandwiches, a coffee and bottle of water, and a small cup of yogurt since our domestic flights don’t even provide bags of peanuts anymore in flight. But, as a promise to Libby, this will be the only time that I complain about how ridiculously expensive it is to travel. It took her all of about an hour to get tired of hearing about that from me and she has threatened bodily harm on me if I don’t contain myself. (Of course I won’t remember this promise later if there is some pricing of some sort that I wish to complain about, but it’s a nice gesture on my part, I think, to at least supply the lip service. Come to think of it, what kind of travel guide would this be if I didn’t discuss price differences. Screw that. This guide is nothing if it can’t be incredibly useful to someone down the road. My whole experience would have been a waste if I couldn’t help someone down the road through it. Yeah, that will work.)

So, forty-five minutes before our flight was scheduled to leave, we still hadn’t seen Molly and JF. Libby kept wandering back down to security and asking me to watch for “salt and pepper shakers” coming up the walkway (Molly and JF are cute-as-a-button “little people” by normal person standards and this in some way equates salt and pepper shakers in her mind. Eventually, Molly and JF retaliated by labeling us the ketchup and mustard bottles, which I suppose is fair). Right before boarding started, though, we spotted them coming through security. Apparently, they hadn’t noticed that American didn’t fly their own planes to New Zealand, as I wouldn’t have noticed if Libby wasn’t with me, and they had spent the last hour wandering around their domestic area asking employees who obviously had no idea where they should go. Somehow they found their correct destination and they arrived at our terminal just as we were boarding.

And then we were on our way. Luckily, the flight wasn’t crammed full, so the quicker thinking people were able to leave full rows and spread out on less full rows. Fortunately, the very smelly stranger who was scheduled to share the three-seat row with Libby and I was a fast thinker and he jumped into the empty row in front of us, which meant that we had a little more room to spread out and an empty seat to store our pillows and personal bags in, allowing us at least the full range of limited leg room that was afforded us.

Before I get any further, I would like to note that Qantas was an excellent airline to travel. The staff was exceedingly, almost annoyingly, cheerful (and Australian, so they all that that “no worries” quality to them) and they stayed that way through the whole, long trip, even after we had been delayed for six hours. They served us two hot meals and supplied us with plenty of bottles of water, fruit and hot cocoa through the night (to those few of us who were unable to sleep, that is). I highly recommend their airline. It was a breath of fresh air after dealing with American-based (and here I mean the companies are American, not just the ones that use that word in their name) airlines for so long.

The flight itself was mostly long, boring and uneventful, except for inside my head. As I mentioned earlier, I had brought the first season of a television series along with me. I borrowed it from Kris (who had borrowed it from Brian about six months back but never returned it). It was the ABC series “Lost.” For those of you unfamiliar with the show, let me just explain to you how NOT appropriate this series was for me to take on an overseas flight to the south pacific. In the first episode, we learn that an international flight from Sydney to LAX has crashed on a small tropical island in the middle of nowhere. Every five minutes there is a flashback scene to the airplane hitting major turbulence quickly followed by the entire tail section of the plane sheering off. Not the sort of thing to let an uneasy mind rest.

So, instead of resting, I decided to create my own cast of characters from the people surrounding me. Unfortunately, in the series, NO cabin crew or airline personnel survived (for very long at least), so that meant that the rather attractive blond flight attendant who looked like a slightly younger Sharon Stone was a goner. Oh well. After walking the aisles a few times, I noticed that our cast was going to be significantly less attractive than the television cast. There were a few young hotties, which was fantastic for me as a survivor looking for places to spread my seed so the human race could press on or whatever excuse I came up with at the time to get in their pants, but the cast of attractive male characters was going to be sorely lacking.

Now, normally I would be the last person to toot my own horn, or even claim that I own a horn, but this flight was, I think, unusually lacking in the male character department. Let’s just say that I would have, in all likelihood, been a contender for at least a supporting cast role, by conventional television standards. Actually, we couldn’t have pulled off a conventional television cast. We would have had a main cast of characters filled with attractive females and disproportionately “carney” looking male leads. I would have been the sort of normal looking “freak,” possibly the replacement for the fat guy on the TV series. And, based on what I was seeing of the people, it was also going to be a very uninteresting series, probably not even making it all the way through our pilot episode. If I was going to single-handedly repopulate the human race, I would have to do it in a single one hour time slot.

It was also at about this time that I pondered the disconcerting notion that I had lost a day. Anyone who has traveled west past the date line knows what this is like, and I had been told by a few people how odd the concept was, but it wasn’t until I experienced it first hand that I really knew what they were talking about. We left home at noon on August 2^nd, and we were scheduled to arrive in Aukland at 5:30 on August 4^th, though our actual travel time was only around twenty-four hours. Beyond the sheer confusion of somehow losing a day without being drunk or stoned, I was also a little sad, because August 3^rd has always been one of my favorite days. For instance, I find myself always celebrating the great discoverers in Western civilization on August 3^rd because this was both the day that Columbus set out for American and the day that Hudson discovered the large body of water off Canada that he had the humble foresight to name after himself. Also on this day in 1882, Congress passed the Immigration Act, banning Chinese immigrants for ten years. I could just imagine the throngs of proud Chinese-Americans, filling the streets to join their ethnically diverse brothers and sisters to celebrate the happy melting pot-ness of modern America, but, sadly, I missed the day entirely. I hope everyone else celebrated extra hard for me.

Otherwise, the first, I don’t know, many hours of the flight were uneventful. The entertainment package the plane had was really quite extensive. There was a slew of movies—at least twenty in all—ranging from new releases to classics. There were a few dozen television shows to choose from, so I was able to see a few newer BBC comedies that I hadn’t heard of before (and probably won’t hear of again). There were documentaries and news programs and just all sorts of stuff. One could fly a dozen times a month and not view all of the options on there. In addition, the controls for the TV could be pulled away from the arm rests and used as controllers to play video games (of the solitaire and chess variety), and they had a flight path locator program that pulled up all of the statistics of the flight (how far to go, how high we were, that sort of thing) and showed a little plane over the ocean heading towards Aukland on the north island of New Zealand.

All in all, they amply supplied us with entertainment, or at least would have if two of our three systems hadn’t been malfunctioning. I, however, had my DVD player and Gameboy, so I was fine without them. But it did mean that I didn’t get to see any of the movies unless they were force feeding it to all of the seats, as they did twice after they grounded us in Nadi (pronounced both “naughty” and “naddy” by our Australian pilot) in the Fiji Islands.

Which they did because of horrible fog in Aukland. We were only about forty-five minutes out from Aukland when the pilot came on and said we were diverting back to the Fiji islands because Aukland airport was closed. This was about two hours out of our way. So I watched our little airplane abruptly change course and head north towards some little islands.

My only hope was that I would get to witness the explosion of an active volcano as karmic justification for us being mildly inconvenienced. I stared out the window for most of the time that we were stuck on the tarmac in Nadi, which was about two hours, and not one single time did a mountain explode. And we couldn’t get off the plane because there was no customs official at the airport, so they couldn’t deplane us without contaminating the entire country with our stink. Which meant the stink stayed in the plane, where it was building to a menacing funk. And it didn’t help that the air conditioner was only blowing out non-cooled air.

Eventually we got back into the air, but we were slated to land in Aukland nearly six hours after we were scheduled to land, and we had no way of contacting Libby’s parents, Karen and Darrell. Because of our delay, we were likely to miss both of our connecting flights, and unless they had the foresight to check the flight status of not the last flight we should have been on, which I think was delayed but eventually arrived, but two flights earlier—and there was no reason why anyone would ever think to do that—then they would be standing in the airport watching an entire plane disembark and never see the four of us, and this is exactly what happened. When we did finally get into Aukland and gathered up all of our bags and processed through customs, we bought a phone card, found a phone and called Darrell’s cell phone.

From here our options were few and the laid-back Australian attitude became mildly irritating. Instead of bending over backwards to get us into Queenstown (which, incidentally, is in the middle of the south island and is the main tourist hub of at least that part of the country) or find us suitable accommodations, the Qantas personnel were pretty much just telling us that there was no way for us to get to Queenstown that day, and we should find some way to occupy ourselves until the following day when flights would be available. While the prospects of sight-seeing a strange new town did have a little appeal, doing it in hour thirty-one of our travels seemed pretty unappealing, so we made arrangements to fly at least as far as Christchurch (which is on the east coast towards the northern end of the south island). We told this to Darrell and he agreed to drive from Queenstown, where they’d been waiting for the last six hours, to Christchurch. It would take them about six more hours to get there—though everybody in the airport claimed it would only take three hours.

It was on the flight into Christchurch that we were finally able to see some of the extraordinary landscape of the country that we were visiting. Snow capped mountains, lush green fields and sparse human developments were all we could see. About midway through that flight, as I sat there listening to some of my favorite music on my mp3 player, able to look up from an enjoyable book to see splendid vistas, sitting next to my wonderful wife, it dawned on me just how idyllic this experience was and how lucky I was to be experiencing it. And that, dear friends, is as corny as I am capable of getting.

I also noted with some trepidation that, from the sky, fields full of sheep look almost exactly like writhing maggots plundering a putrid green body. But even a field full of giant maggots couldn’t dampen my spirits.

Once we landed there was plenty of local color in the airport to keep my mind occupied. There was a girls rugby team (I assumed they played rugby because they were far too beat up looking to be soccer players and rugby is a more popular sport in New Zealand), a homeless bearded lady, and no end of chipper, pleasant people wandering around in the airport. Eventually, we decided that we would be spending the first night in Christchurch because traveling back to Queenstown would have gotten us there around 2:00 in the morning or later—and since that would have put us at forty-five hours of straight traveling, we figured it was time for a night of sleep. Once Karen and Darrell caught up with us at the hotel, we had a quick dinner and promptly passed out, content to at least be heading in the right direction again and anxious to start sightseeing the next day.

Oh, and for those of you who are keeping score. It’s gotten into the 40s here in the evenings. I had to wear a pair of gloves and pull the hood up on my jacket when I went outside. Eat that summer dwellers!

At any rate, we had finally arrived and, as it turned out, the delay forcing us into Christchurch instead of Queenstown afforded us an entire extra day of exploring the sites along the way, which we would not have otherwise had. So everything worked out just fine in the end.