28 June-30 June 2014: Traveling to New Zealand

I had never made a journey as the long as the one that got me to New Zealand.  I left College Park at about 3:00pm on Saturday, June 28th, and arrived at my hotel at about 6:00pm on Monday, June 30th, a total of about 35 hours of transit.  And, let me tell you: ugh.

After Peter drove me out to Dulles, I made my way around one of my least favorite airports in the country and boarded my flight to Los Angeles.  I had a window seat, thank goodness, and was even the first one in my row to board.  A couple of kids sat down next to me.  The one in the middle seat immediately turned to me and asked me if I'd be willing to give me his window seat, because he preferred sitting there.  A moral quandary ensued.  On the one hand, he was younger than me, and deserved to have the thrill of seeing his country from the air like I had enjoyed when I was his age.  On the other hand, gosh darn it, I wanted the window seat.

Thankfully, my quandary was forestalled by the rest of his family, who shouted him down.  (That way, they could sit contiguously.)  Whew.  That emergency out of the way, the only emergency that was faced for the rest of the trip was the medical emergency that unfolded somewhere over Texas.  I couldn't see what happened, and we didn't have to make an emergency landing, but, in between that and our already-delayed departure, we were about 90 minutes late into LAX.

So, I got to be one of the people who rushed out immediately after the flight attendants say "some passengers are making a tight connection, so please be seated if LA is your final destination", which was a first for me.  We came in at the gate literally neighboring our departure gate for Sydney, and they had delayed our flight to Sydney by 30 minutes, because I guess there were enough of us to make that doable.  I was pretty surprised, honestly!

I boarded my flight to Sydney, and got to my customary window seat.  Then began the great Prayer of the Window Seat: please don't sit here, please don't sit here, please don't take the seat next to me.  The Prayer is only sporadically answered in the modern aviation industry, but somehow the gods were listening - although the flight was almost full, somehow the seat next to me was not!  Yesssss!

Me being me, I had developed an hour-by-hour list of activities to do on my flight, to make sure I stayed productive and slept at a relatively appropriate time.  I'm generally terrible at sleeping on planes, so I figured I could stay up for a while in a bid to adjust my internal clock.  But I couldn't adhere to my schedule.  My flight from LAX departed at 10:00pm local time, or 1:00am internal clock time, and so soon I found myself collapsing.  At least I didn't have any problems sleeping for a couple of hours, I suppose?

It's about a 15 hour flight between LAX and Sydney.  Sure, that's kind of terrible, but, honestly, sometimes Heffner family road trips between Minneapolis and Detroit lasted that long, so I guess I had some experience with it.  The weirdest part was the complete blackness out of the windows.  Because of our departure time, it was completely dark when we left LA, and our arrival in Sydney was at 6:00am local time, so we spent the entire flight during "night".  There were also no lights whatsoever coming from the most isolated stretches of the Pacific Ocean, for obvious reasons.  It was a bizarre situation to be in.  I knew time was passing... great periods of time, actually.  But I had no way to tell beyond what our screens were saying the time was in Sydney and LA.

At the Sydney Airport, I had about a five hour layover scheduled... probably not enough time to go out and do anything in Sydney, unfortunately.  So I spent some time waiting with Theresa, one of the other grad students from UMD going to the conference.  She has an irrepressibly perky personality, I think part of her past as a teacher, so I got along with her swimmingly.  (It's hard to imagine anyone not getting along with Theresa.)  However, she had an earlier flight over to Auckland, so I got to spend a lot of time waiting.  Then a lot time more waiting, because my flight to Auckland was delayed by an hour or so for unspecified reasons.

By the time I was boarding the plane to Auckland, I was pretty exhausted.  The Air New Zealand clerk gave me a withering look as I tried to bring my carry-on suitcase onto the plane.  "That's much too big," he said, "we'll need to check it to Auckland."  He then proceeded to ask me several times whether my final destination was Auckland.  I totally understood his caution, but after the fifth or sixth time I felt a little talked down to.  Yes, despite my American passport, I was indeed going to Auckland, full-stop.  Jeez Louise.

My flight to Auckland was shocking.  I was fed!  I got a meal!  There were in-seat entertainment systems!  And all this for a 2.5 hour flight!  It was pretty nonsensical to my American sensibilities, but I wasn't complaining... at all.  For the meal, they mentioned that they had New Zealand wine, which I had heard was fantastic, so I had a glass... and, uh, that was a bad idea, it turns out, as drinking a glass of wine with the ridiculous jet lag and sleep deprivation I was feeling made the wine affect me much more than it should have.  Rather than doing some of the work I had planned, I instead watched "Wreck-It Ralph", which I enjoyed.

During my shuttle ride from the airport, I managed to avoid falling asleep, while the two other people on my flight (students from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney) did.  I felt somewhat smug.  After checking in at the (very lovely) Copthorne Hotel, I, Theresa, and a couple of grad students she had met went out to dinner at a burger restaurant we stumbled into, all of us (but the Australia student) speaking rather incoherently and doing a lot of staring at our burgers.  I returned to my hotel, stayed up past 9pm, then immediately fell asleep, and managed to stay asleep until 7:30am the next morning (with just one interruption).  Whew.