Jon’Spot

Well, aside from some issues in Chicago, I made it to New Zealand ok. It was snowing when we left Chicago, so the flight was delayed for an hour and a half. The 12 hour, 25 minute flight from Los Angeles to Auckland was not as bad as I’d anticipated. I watched the first movie they showed (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), then proceeded to (more or less) sleep for the next several hours. They started serving breakfast at about 5:00 am (NZ time), during which I watched The World’s Fastest Indian, which is about a Kiwi (New Zealander) who spent years working on a 1920 Indian motorcycle, then brought it up to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to set a land speed record in 1967 (which was only recently broken, I believe). If the bike in the movie is at all representative of his real bike, it’s absolutely amazing (a) that he reached over 200mph, and (b) that he didn’t kill himself in the process.

Anyway, we got to Auckland on time (Sunday, 7:30 am) and the weather was perfect - sunny, with temperatures somewhere in the 60s. I picked up the bike and by 11:00 I was again travelling. After a couple stops along the way, I arrived in Kerikeri (near the Bay of Islands, about 3 hours North of Auckland) and pulled into Glenfalloch at about 4:00 that afternoon, 34 hours after I first arrived at Albany Airport. Needless to say, I was pretty drained at this point, so I took a short nap in a nice hot bath to try to wash off some of my travel grime. When I woke up, I met the other guests, a couple from England, and started to contemplate food… right as a storm blew in from the Pacific. My hosts were kind enough to give me a little bread and cheese so I wouldn’t have to go out in the rain :). (Fortunately, the rain cleared pretty quickly, and hasn’t been back yet.) I stayed up as long as I could that night, which is to say that as soon as the sun went down and it started to get dark (about 9:00), I immediately started to fall asleep. I gave up, and accepted the fact that I was not going to be able to adjust to the time difference in one day.