This morning - seems ages ago - Anne picked me up from home to drop me off at the airport. She was highly amused by my little black bag of only 18 kg's. People who immigrate should have tons of bags and stuff. Well, not me. I did, however, pack the strangest things, like my golf umbrella holder, Age's cycle shoes, lots of books for work, my favourite cookbooks, some kind of internet cable, an adaptor for the iphone for in the car, my brilliant headset, ... This just means that I need to shop for clothes this weekend. But that's easy enough.
The flight from Nelson to Aukland was fine, but we were about 10 minutes late, and when I checked my schedule I actually only would have an hour before I had to board my next plane. After checking my schedule again, as I found that a bit tight, it became even worse, as departure would be within the hour, and boarding at least half an hour before that.
Crap!!!
Of course I never got my bag, the baggage handlers had a coffee break or so, and what normally takes only 2 minutes now took 20 minutes. So I had 10 minutes left to get from the Domestic terminal to the International terminal, to check in, to clear security, and to go to the gate to board. In other words, I would probably miss my flight to Australia!! Aaarghhh.
As soon as I got my bag I started running and ran all the way to the international terminal with my trolley - that is about 10 minutes. So my advice to all of you is to keep fit. You never know when you need your lungs. The first thing I saw on the board was that the Check In had closed. CLOSED. Aaarghhhh.
But I saw this queue still standing there for the counters, so I thought I'll just join the queue too. After 10 seconds in the queue I asked the lady in front of me where she was going to. Los Angeles, she said. Hmmm, that queue wasn't going to get me to Australia. There were two ground staff still sitting at their empty counters, processing a pilot or something like that, and I jumped over the fence and asked if they could check me in to Melbourne. O lalala, check in was closed, so they had to make a call. While one of them made a call, the other one told me to jump the queue, bring my bag over and she would check me in. Woohooo.
Then, I suddenly seemed to have landed in one of those airport documentaries, they got me my personal stewart, who had to run me through customs, security, and then to the gate, which was of course miles away in some corner of the airport. When we arrived at the gate, sweating like a pig, I'll tell you, they hadn't started boarding yet :-) And I desperately needed to pee, so when they started boarding I sneaked away to find a loo. Pfew.
Oh, and another tip: it may not be so smart to put your umbrella holder in your hand luggage, as customs in Auckland as well as Melbourne was highly interested in it. 'What are those big bolts you have in your bag there?' 'What the hell is that?'. I have to say, if I was working in customs I would be suspicious too. It looks a bit like a machine gun.
The rest of the trip went fine. And now I'm home.
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