My flight from SFO left at 7:00pm on Sunday night. I knew this would be plenty of time to get stuff together on Sunday, but I didn't realize how many odds and ends I had to take care of.
I had arrived back in Palo Alto Saturday afternoon after visting Andrea in Seattle, which was wonderful, as always. This was just in time to see my brother and my mom who happened to be in Palo Alto. They gave me a kindle for christmas!
Any way, Saturday night Tomas, Matt and Alex threw Sarah and I a going away party, which I believe to have been a resounding success. Not getting a whole lot of sleep the night before a long flight worried me, but in the end worked out fine. On Sunday I packed, turned off the watering at my garden plot, bought food, and picked up a bunch of stuff from the lab that I am hand carrying down. This means I had to check two bags instead of one.
Alex drove Sarah and I to the airport. It was a dark and stormy night, which seemed fitting. Of course the plane was over an hour late..
In at LAX we ran into Chin-Lin and a bunch of other grad students headed to Antarctica. We boarded the flight around midnight, had dinner, and I fell asleep....until 9 the next morning! Way better than I usually sleep in. This only left 4 hours of the flight left, which was very manageable.
Going through Customs in Aukland, I was intimidated by the hundreds of large colorful signs warning about importing food, so I threw out most of the food I had brought. We also ran into Chao-Lin, who coincidently had arrived at nearly the same time from Hong Kong.
We nearly missed our flight to Christchurch, as the Domestic terminal is a considerable walk from the international. Fortunately, airport security is much faster / less intense than the US.
Christchurch is colder than Aukland, but so far very nice. I'm headed out to buy some food, hopefully I'll have pictures later.
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