Escaping the North Carolina Summer

 What better way to escape the sunshine and cooling breezes of the North Carolina mountains than to head down to New Zealand for a month.  Oh how I am looking forward to the cramped surroundings of a 747 (at least I have had the common sense to fly Air New Zealand who recognise that not everybody is 4'9" tall).  More anon...

Anon is here.  It was actually a very good flight.  I had decamped to a less crowded part of the terminal at LAX to avoid sitting in a crowded departures area and, much to my surprise and credit, remembered that I had done so about 20 minutes after boarding was supposed to have started.  A feverish semi-trot to my gate got me there was before my row was boarding and, to my immense distress, my earlier assessment of how full the flight was turned out to be over-optimistic.  I tried to emulate my success in previous years of beng asleep by the time we took off but no such luck this time.  So I read a couple of chapters of Inferno, noshed my beef casserole, washed it down with a couple of generous glasses of white wine (beef and white wine - what a peasant!) and slept soundly for close to 7 hours, leaving me only three and a bit to while away.  A few more chapters of Inferno and some light classical music filled the rest of the flight.

The family one and two rows in front of me were clearly in no mood to let anyone get out ahead of them and I didn't fancy getting stuck behind them so I politely(ish) pointed out that, if I got in front of them, it would leave them more room to manage getting their brood off the plane.  Needn't really have bothered ans the man in front of them was one of those people who believe that everyone has the right to go in front of him.  Immigration processing was a far cry from the 3 hour exercise of the 1980s and I got to the baggage carousel as the first of the crew's bags came off.  My bag, if you're interested, was bag number 326 though I'll admit I double-counted bags that went round more than once.  No sign of Georgia as I burst forth into the real world but it turned out that I was either standing outside the wrong McD's or Amy was.  Halleluiah!  Time to rip off my mask that I had been wearing for about 15 hours: somehow I had managed to get a "People with grapefruit sized heads" one that had threatened to amputate my ears

And so, via Countdown at Orewa, to Al & Linda's place on top of a cliff halfway between Orewa and Wenderholm and time to settle in for a few days.

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