Home at last

Well that trip home was really unpleasant, but its over now. Mark Twain once said ‘the longest winter of my life, was the summer I spent in San Francisco…’ and I can tell him the autumn is no picnic either. I wasn’t being picked up from my hotel until 4 so I went out to have my last walk around in the US, but there was a storm (which I here was the tail end of a cyclone). This may have been the first rain I saw since my first day in New York but it really did make doing anything seem like a bad idea. I though thou where I could stay warm and dry for several hours, and I realized most pubs fit that bill, so my last few hours of the trip where in a Irish pub just up from Fisherman wharf.

I then went back and waited from my shuttle, now with the conditions everyone was running late. This meant that I was a little late for the final check in time. Lucky (and very un-American) this didn’t cause any problems. Un luckily the plane was also delayed, by a little over 3 hours as it turned out. We were sitting on the plain wondering if this meant we were too late to make the plane out of LAX, with great timing we landed after boarding had commenced but before the plane was due to takeoff, so this meant I spent a total of 8 minutes at LAX, most of this was running from one gate to the next (The best LAX experience ever). After the fun little 12 hour trip arriving in Auckland we found out that our bags weren’t as quick as us and were still in LA, bugger. This meant a whole lot of form filling etc to make sure we got our bags (they were only 26 hours late getting home) which pushed me a bit close in getting to my next flight, the time the plane started boarding I was still with customs. After a quick trip across the Auckland airport (Oh how I do like the efficiency of the NZ aviation security) I made it with seconds to spear. Now I am not sure it was some new form of clam I picked up on the river or simply I was to tiered to do anything else but all this didn’t seem all that bad in the seam of things but I was really glad to be home and have decent coffee (the flight that had great views of the sounds and the snow on the Kaikouras also managed to welcome me home.)