A trip to America


The day of my departure from New Zealand had come. My feelings about it were very mixed. On one hand I was pretty sad about leaving all my new friends knowing I'll probably never see most of them ever again and to be honest overall I had a great time in this country. On the other hand I was very excited to visit my aunt Caroline and my uncle John over in Arizona in the United States and I was pretty glad to leave the dark side of New Zealand that I've lived in for a while.


Maria and Marlene kindly accompanied me to Napier airport to spent my last few hours with me. Unlike me, both of them haven't had breakfast yet and I don't even know how I could have breakfast at 5am.

My flight from Napier to Auckland left at 08:15 and I've decided to do all 3 flights on one day. Auckland wasn't worth to stay there for one more night and technically the flight from Auckland to Phoenix with transit in San Francisco would have taken only about 15 hours. The flight from Napier to Auckland takes 50 minutes.

 The first thing I did in Auckland Airport was changing into a thinner shirt after Napier only had -2°C when I left in the morning and Auckland turned out to be much warmer at 10°C. So far so good. The Check-In was already open by 10:30am for my flight at 1:30pm. Unfortunately they couldn't check me in yet but wanted me to come back by 12pm. This gave me almost one and a half hours time until I had to check in, but I wanted to be there by 11:50am latest. 

 They almost forgot giving me my boarding pass and checking in my luggage, I got it at 12:30pm. The security went fast with approximately 10 minutes, but boarding already started at the same time. Bad news were: walking to my gate took 20 minutes minimum... I rushed through the airport, hoping to catch my flight and if I was lucky buying something to eat too. 

 As I was approaching my gate, they announced that passengers of my flight should go to the gate immediately. Seconds later an officer told me that I've been selected for their random screening program. Seriously? My nerves were on edge. I only had 15 minutes left until boarding closed. 

  Luckily, I still got my plane just in time. The flight took 13 hours and covered a distance of 10486km from Auckland to San Francisco. Funny enough, I arrived in San Francisco earlier than my flight from Napier to Auckland left due to crossing the international dateline.
In San Francisco I had some more complications but managed to get to this flight too. At the arrival in Phoenix where Caroline and John were already waiting for me, we waited for my checked in luggage and strange enough it didn't show up. They said some bags of my plane didn't make it onto the plane in San Francisco but they'd bring them to Phoenix with the next plane that came in just a few hours later. Fortunately I had all my important things in my carry-on bag and borrowed some clothes from Caroline. My checked in bag arrived no earlier than the following day.

First photo by courtesy of John Wise

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