Getting Here

It’s 18,329km between Heathrow and Auckland airport, half the planet away and on the two opposing hemispheres to where I started, I got there in a climate controlled aircraft flying at an altitude of eleven kilometres with a ground speed of over 800kmh^-1 taking in total just over twenty seven hours which is an amazing feat of engineering, international co-operation, organization and many other countless factors. But it’s excruciatingly boring and takes far too long.

I walked the dog and left my family at St Austell station at lunchtime on the 1^st June for a six hour train journey to Heathrow airport, this went normally and I got through security and boarded the aeroplane in good time, what more is there to say about that. The first leg of the journey took thirteen hours followed by another eight hours, that’s twenty one hours of being sat in the same seat with the same view. The choice of Airline TV programmes was a bit dismal, one episode of the Simpsons, one episode of the big bang theory etc etc. The film selection was quite varied and some quite good films were available and I ended up watching ‘Little Fockers’ whilst flying over Afghanistan and the latest Indiana Jones film whilst flying over Australia, which is a country far too big for its own good, it took four whole hours to fly over. The flight between Sydney and Auckland was somewhat better due to it being mostly empty and getting a window seat. It’s a strange thing to be eating breakfast with a view of the waves eleven thousand metres below whilst watching a feature length episode of Family Guy (it was the best there was) on the TV in front of you. Upon arrival I adjusted my watch to GMT+11, moved the date to the 3rd and realized Thursday had passed me by without me noticing, how odd.

Customs went fine, they were even polite enough to clean my walking boots for me, following this I was greeted by my Aunty and cousins at the airport, I was finally actually in Auckland! It’s winter here but the warm breeze that greeted me upon leaving the airport was more like a pleasant late spring breeze in the UK (Cornwall any way) and this apparently is cold for Auckland. We sent off to Belmont in the car and the next thing that struck me, with potential literal connotation, was a car reversing at high speed the wrong way down a motorway slip road! The general quality of driving didn’t improve much from then on, driving here will definitely be interesting. We arrived at the house safely and I was introduced to my room which has a view of the Auckland harbour bridge and the Sky Tower, nice.

Later after fifty hours of being awake I went to bed.