Trip To New Zealand

13 Feb and 15 Feb, with Valentine’s Day MIA

This was a friggin long trip. I think I was actually travelling for at least 24 hours. It started out ok with my family dropping me off at BWI (surprisingly with time to spare) whence I flew to Chicago and Cincinatti on my way to LA. Talked to some interesting people on the way and had some great views once the clouds cleared up over the Midwest and West (it’s amazing how suddenly the Great Plains turn into the Rockies! You just see flat, flat, flat, flat, MOUNTAINS! with a straight line between them. Weird).

Up to LA I had no baggage problems because there were no transfers, but at LA I was waiting for my bike to show up (in a cardboard bicycle box stuffed with all kinds of other stuff and checked as a piece of luggage) when I heard over the loudspeaker, “Will the person waiting for a bicycle please come to the baggage claim office.” Hmmm, not a good sign… I went over to discover that they couldn’t find my name on the box (even though it was written in large black marker in 3 places) and the tag had come off so they were about to ship it back to Baltimore. Yes, so I put a hasty stop to that. Back to the oversize baggage area to wait some more…and more… and more… and then back to the claims office to discover that someone had decided a huge bicycle box would not count as oversize baggage and tried to send it down the normal chute to the baggage carousel, where it had promptly gotten stuck halfway down. Dealt with that, got my crap checked into the international terminal (where they made me open up my bags and redistribute, because one was 3 kilos overweight, one was 3 under... actually I had to leave a baseball glove behind too) and then went out to dinner with my cousin Brian, who lives in LA.

Speaking of whom, I owe many, many thanks to Brian for helping me out at the airport and treating me to a nice dinner at a cool restaurant nearby. It was way up on a tower and had a great view over the city. So official shout out to Brian goes here.

The long LA to New Zealand flight wasn't too bad, but long. Of note, during the flight I was served my first legal glass of wine. Arrived in Auckland, made it through customs with my trusty jar of peanut butter, opened up my bike box yet again to prove it wasn't contaminated with foreign mud, trecked a kilometer through a warm rainburst to the domestic terminal with all my crap (they couldn't check my oversize bike box at the transfer place), and made my flight on time.

Next stop was Christchurch where I switched to a tiny prop plane, watched my bike box pull up on the baggage train, and then watched it pull away again. Apparently the plane was overweight and they had to send it on a later flight.

Finally the plane touched down in Dunedin at something like 10 in the morning local time on a beautiful sunny day at pretty much the tiniest airport I've ever been to. Fairly nice though. The student taxi driver was very friendly and helped me arrange to get my bike sent to the backpackers hostel where I was staying. Got to the backpackers, went down to uni to take care of some of the quarter-metric-tonne of paperwork crap, and finally went to sleep, pretty much exhausted. No wait, actually I only took about an hour nap and then went out to dinner at a Korean place with my international mentor Ai Wei, who is Malaysian and very nice. Then I collapsed.