2006/05 NZ trip - Introduction |
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Dear All,
Even with months of warning, the preparations for the trip to New Zealand were a bit hectic. We’re getting better at planning what we’ll take, but it’s always more than last time! It used to be that we just had to pack cameras and film, but now it’s cameras and spare batteries and battery chargers, and computer connections. Also, we aren’t guaranteed to have months of Australia’s warmth as it’s likely to be cold at night in the desert and mountains, and, of course, being winter down there we will have a lot of night! So we also have many movies and talking books along to fill in the evenings, and fleecy clothes to help us survive until dawn..
Back in Minnesota, we had a good crop of goslings this year, though they’d get thinned out later by the snapping turtles and the cats. Last year Christina had to wrestle Sooty away from his dinner, a large unhappy gosling. The other two cats aren’t as ambitious, and they stick to mice and rabbits. Lisa still catches things even though she’s almost blind. I was sitting in kitchen and heard a thud in the living room, and a few minutes later, Lisa appeared, dragging herself along by her left paw, and meowing pitifully at me. I thought she’d had a stroke or something but it turned out that her right leg was stuck through her collar. Hence the thud as she made a headfirst landing from the chair. At least she knew where to go to get it fixed.
Michael had finally got the engine and transmission back into the Geo, so it was on its way to running. At least it could be moved then, so we took the opportunity to move it out of the garage. This gave us access to the utility trailer so we were able to take a stupendous pile of junk off to the dump on clean-up day.
Christina took us to the airport. This was her last day of college until August, so she was looking around for a summer job, possibly at Copymax, a good choice as she spends a lot of money there printing and fabricating projects for school. One of her projects was a Web site for a company making outdoor gear for the elderly (like us). One of the products was to be large diapers for elderly hikers. I suggested she call the project “Huggies through Hugies”, but she turned it down. Maybe I’ll save the title for the next great American novel, summarizing birth and death in the USA.
The forms arrived the day before we left for Sandie’s pension in the UK. Amazingly, the system seems to be set up for weird people like us who are resident in the USA and want the UK pension paid to a bank in Canada. We’ll see if it all works! Not so conveniently, I noticed just before we left that our cash cards for Australia had expired last year, so we had a last minute call to the Bank of Melbourne to get new ones arranged for us to pick up when we arrive there. “It’s bank policy not to send new cards to overseas customers”. It would have been nice if they’d sent us a note at the time.
We had a sad piece of news just as we were leaving. Our neighbour Bev had just heard that her cancer had come back. She’s having chaemotherapy but only with the expectation of slowing the cancer down, not curing it. Her husband Buck has Parkinson’s and is very frail, so things don’t look good for them. Our kids had instructions to mow their lawn and look out for them while we were gone.
Tuesday May 9th
I was writing the first section at Los Angeles, waiting for our flight to Auckland. May must be the dead season for flying in that direction, as our Air New Zealand tickets were the cheapest we’d ever had for a trip to Australia, and the stop in New Zealand was free. Similarly, the camper we were renting cost NZ$18 a day instead of the $140 it costs in January! The weather forecast for New Zealand didn’t look to be all that bad, but I guessed we’d find out when we got there why the season’s end is so abrupt.
At LA there are 8 or 9 terminals so it was a nice surprise to find that we didn’t have to trundle everything along the street this time. However, although the ANZ gate was only a few feet away, because of security, we still had to leave the terminal, and go out on the street and come back in again in order to check in.
The flight to LA had been packed to the doors, but the Air New Zealand flight had enough space left to be comfortable. The newer jumbos have personalized movie screens with dozens of movies to choose from so you can watch for 12 hours solid if you have the stamina. There wasn’t anything to watch out the window as it was dark for the entire flight. I watched the World’s Fastest Indian, a movie about Bert Monro, the old New Zealander with severe angina who took his 1922 Indian motorcycle, complete with home-made pistons and streamlining, to the Salt Lakes in Bonneville in the 1960s and picked up a world 
record at over 200 mph. Two of the people who helped him out were Marty Dickenson and Rollie Free, both owners of Vincents. Rollie used to race Vincents at Bonneville. Marty we met in the 80s at a club rally in Iowa. You may have seen a picture of Rollie in the 40s taking a world record at 150 mph laying face-down on a factory-standard Vincent Black Lightning, with his legs stretched out behind him, and clad only in a shower cap and swimming trunks. He would have needed a few band-aids if he’d fallen off.