Tramping New Zealand

DAY 24 - Getting Home

With no time for breakfast this morning, it's a two-block walk to the bus stop at 7 a.m.

Check out those business hours!

Then it's a twenty-minute ride to the airport.

Queenstown Airport scenes

I sneak this 'illegal' shot on the tarmac

This plane has an ongoing trivia quiz on its drop-down screens, and that is rather fun.  My relatively new eye even can read the next screen that is three rows away; and with my glasses on, I actually can read the one six rows away.

We're on the way

Partly because of horror stories about the service on UAL, I am carrying my hiking water bottle.  Unfortunately, it no longer is water-tight; so when I lay my carry-on pack under the seat in front of me, it leaks a bit all over my laptop computer and its peripherals.  While trying to deal with this problem, I foolishly drop my mouse dongle (a tiny black plastic thingy) onto the floor.  Because it is so cramped, I cannot look for it until the other passengers have left the plane, and even then I cannot find it.  Horrors.

In retrospect, I didn't search the magazine holder attached to the back of the seat.  Stupid.  In any case, the spare mouse that I purchased a couple of weeks ago in Queensland is, of course, in my luggage where I cannot access it.  This is going to severely cripple my productivity during the upcoming layover.

At the Auckland airport, having plenty of spare time, I do look for something that my sweetie might like; but I just cannot decide which flavor to choose:

As Dave and I board for the final flight, the nightmare resumes.  Because our tickets once again have morphed from Air New Zealand to the hated United Airlines, our reserved aisle seating also has disappeared in favor of a middle seat for me (ugh); and we must pay yet another extra $300 for two pieces of luggage.

Next, our departure from Auckland is delayed.  For the next hour and a half we are given reports about paperwork and weight-balance and passports and changed runways and the fact that it is raining.  Then the stewardess tries to blame standing passengers for the problem, even as crew officers are running around in the cabin and luggage is being shuffled about.

Dave and I had intended to play bridge shortly after arriving home, and our prospective partners are waiting anxiously.  Because a plan is in place, this delay in itself should not cripple our chances; yet if anything else goes wrong, we might not achieve the goal of playing cards yesterday upon our return.

The man next to me in the aisle seat doesn't seem to care about any of this, however; for he is busily reading an erotic novel on his kindle even as Dave is mid-way through a huge but far less exciting treatise on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve.  While trying to glance at a juicy key word or two on the man's device, I see the word "but" misspelled as "bur"; so I lose interest.  They probably spell it correctly in Dave's book.

Sunrise over San Francisco

When the geezer to my left has finished his novel, he closes up his reader and places it in the purse of his presumed wife who is sitting just across the aisle.  Perhaps it's her turn to read it now.

Somehow, a bit of time is made up during the flight, because we arrive only about fifty minutes late.  After half an hour of dealing with customs, we are out of there and rushing for the BART station.  The plan is to take the train all the way to the end of the line at Pittsburg, where our buddy Ali will be waiting to whisk us back to the Bridge Center.

On BART

Even getting onto BART is a hassle.  The entrance gates are designed to let only one object through at a time, so I must either throw my pack over the gate or slide it underneath before going through myself with my big suitcase.  Some guards behind a window scowl at me for that, yet say nothing.

Then comes the straw that could break our backs.  As soon as we board the car, the driver tells us that some power lines are down across the tracks and that we cannot get across the Bay Bridge to Oakland.  Omigod.  There's no telling how long we will have to sit around at Embarcadero Station.

Miraculously enough, though, just as we near the Embarcadero, it is announced that the obstruction has been cleared and that our train will be able to continue after all; so that is a big relief.  Because Ali does not have a cellular phone, there would have been no easy way to contact him.

At the end of the track, Ali is indeed waiting as expected, having been there quite a while.  There isn't enough time remaining to get us back to Sacramento by 11 o'clock, though; so we miss our game by about an hour.