We should now be in Sacramento, US of A!
We are sitting in Auckland airport having lunch courtesy of Air New Zealand! We were supposed to take off yesterday at 7:15pm but the aircraft was found to have an oil leak and we were parked on the tarmac for about 3 hours whilst they tried to fix it. They failed!
We were put into a hotel overnight, Grand Chancellor, where at least we had a good breakfast this morning. We were bussed to the airport at 10am.
Since then we've been given the "run around." First told taking off 2pm, then 3pm, then 3:30pm. Currently we are being told 4pm. Watch this space.
Well we eventually took off at 4:50 pm and had an uneventful flight to San Francisco.
I hope you're well an truly air born as I'm typing this. Looking forward to following your walk (who'd have thought the hardest part would be getting out of your own country?!).
ReplyDeleteHi Gayle,
ReplyDeleteGood to hear from you!
This year's trip has been quite eventful. Two weeks after we booked our hotels in Germany and the Czech Republic, towns along the Elbe had record floods. Then, as stated above, we had trouble leaving NZ. 24 hours after we landed at San Francisco there was a nasty air crash which killed two and injured many more. It also took two of the four available runways out of service.
On returning to Sacramento from South Lake Tahoe on Monday we passed through an area of burning forest. Visibility was deteriorating rapidly due to the smoke and five minutes after we got through the road was closed. There was a very large forest fire. It was cased by sparks from a trailer with a flat tyre. Finally on Wednesday, at Heathrow, we were turned back from our bus to Torquay when a woman on the bus collapsed in what looked like some kind of fit. It was quite distressing to see how long it took before someone with significant medical knowledge arrived on the scene. We hope we have seen the last of these disasters.