The hour or two before leaving for Heathrow was not a good one. The prospect of the impending flights had been on my mind for a couple of days and only got worse that afternoon. It more or less blocked out the excitement I might have been feeling. On top of that, leaving Emily for a month felt pretty bad.
Not being a weekend, this thing called the 'Jubilee Line' was running, so getting to the airport was fairly painless, and in fact only the last couple of the 24 odd hours of flying were at all uncomfortable. Space was pretty tight and I had watched all the good films and TV and had made inroads into the mediocre. Despite watching the snorefest that is The King's Speech I only managed around 4 hours sleep in total, and was started to feel weird.
The diet I had been following inevitably suffered though not disastrously. Just as with my overfamiliarity with the TV remote, the Air New Zealand menu was getting repetitive. The stir fry noodles with dim sum for breakfast was a surprise, and only moderately disgusting.
It was good to see Hong Kong again at the first stopover - the few visible buildings all simultaneously modest and yet totally huge, and great views of mountains and the ocean. Setting foot in New Zealand felt like a significant moment - how strange to be walking on the other side of the planet. The immediate impression came from the American style cars, the $ signs and the American-style fonts on signage. There was also a feeling of everyone being naturally incredibly nice, all the more so for the lack of over-friendliness.
I had been hoping for a window seat on the flights so that I could look out over the mountains of Russia and China, but got nothing even close. As I write this in Auckland Airport's domestic terminal, eating a $3 peanut butter and jam sandwich, I again find myself hoping for this on my next and final flight and wondering what Queenstown is like, how Jim is doing and what sort of place he has and what we're going to get up to. Not necessarily in that order.
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