Crossed the International Dateline

I am sitting here in a lovely, sunny kitchen in Auckland -- the sun has been up since about 6:00 because we have switched seasons, switched days, switched islands, switched countries. All in one ten hour trip. I have my hot yucky next to me and Jon is studying up on how we will navigate today.  Last night was a bit of a trial, but we did get out of the airport and all the way to a real bed, eventually.

The day started on Saturday, rainy and blustery as usual.  After Auntie Annette came back from walking the dog (I am always a tiny bit nervous that she won't come back, but she always does. She says the dog knows the way. Oh good.), we got ourselves over to the Saturday farmers market.  Super crowded and busy because busloads of tourists get dropped off from nearby Waikiki.

There are a few stalls with real food from real farms but mostly it is a snack bar, with people standing in line for smoothies and fried green tomatoes and fancy hamburgers and various lunch items. 

This one is mostly Vietnamese.

People were eating grilled meat at 9:30 in the morning.  It was windy (I checked to see how all those pop-up tents were secured. Very familiar.) and humid.  Most of the real vegetables had been picked over, two hours into the market, but we got some nice greens and too many other things, since we were just leaving all that food in their fridge.

Then started the long trek out of Hawaii.  We think we have it all organized, but something always happens anyway.  This time we stood in line for security (the line started at the curb, and it was long) but by the time we got to the front we realized that "ticketed passengers" meant "passengers with tickets in their hands."  Most airports start out with a sort of lobby experience where you go to the kiosk and get your tickets. Not this one. It took us 45 minutes to right that situation. The place was mobbed.  The TSA people were run ragged. There was still an effort to be cheerful and aloha-friendly, but they were tired and scrambling. We got to the gate as they were starting to board, so really nothing bad happened except that we had to fret (Jon had to fret) and sweat (that was me, walking through those long hallways on my dumb knee and dragging stuff).  Absolutely the hardest part about traveling for me is getting from one comfortable place to the next -- it was three hours of transition between Puamamane St and our seat on a packed plane. Jon was doubly frustrated because we had to stand in line twice because they were bureaucratically chaotic and didn't log in that we really did have tickets to get back out of New Zealand.  I remained zen and sweaty. Thank goodness Alissa had alerted us a day earlier that there was now a visa requirement, so at least we had that handled correctly.

Ten hours of movies and snacks and napping and sitting way too still, but at last we were set free (after they fulfilled the quarantine requirements of this country and sprayed all the baggage in the overhead compartments with some sort of pesticide after we landed.  Can that really work?).

The directions for picking up the rental car were all directed to people who arrive before midnight, on a domestic flight, so we got a grand walking tour of the entire Auckland airport, plus the parking lots and sidewalks in between the two terminals. There were helpful signs about how many more meters we had to go. At that hour, the domestic terminal is closed, actually. But two very, very nice people helped us figure it out and eventually we were in our little car with the steering wheel on the right.  There was a full moon, it was warm and lovely, and at midnight there is very little traffic trying to run you down as you careen down the highway on the left side of the road.

We had missed all but about half an hour of Sunday, and we will never get Sunday, January 12 back again. It is already Monday morning, we woke up early because who really knows what time it is anyway, and we are about to go out for one day of looking around this new city in this new country.