Well, that hardly hurt at all!

We're settling into our rental house in Orewa, about an hour north of Auckland. It's 2:50 in the afternoon on Monday. Or 5:50pm on Sunday! Funny to think that we only share same day of week with everyone at home for 3 hours a day.

The journey to Vancouver and the 14 hour flight to Auckland were amazingly painless.

The drive was straightforward, just a few sleet showers to remind us that the journey can be complicated when the temperatures are just a couple of degrees lower. Border crossing took at most 20 minutes. We arrived in Vancouver with 4 hours to spare before check-in time. So we went to Science World, a museum we visited several times when SC and CC were little. Still a fantastic place. Just took one photo--wheelchair racing!

We parked the car at the long distance lot at YVR, explored the beautiful airport--really one of the loveliest I've ever been to. They have a fantastic public observation area with full view of the runways, and beautiful shops and restaurants.

The latter photo makes it look like the plane was parked inside the terminal building, but it was just a weird reflection of the shops behind me :)

Boarded the plane around 5:45pm, finally took off about an hour later. Felt like more leg room than BA flights, though not expansive by any means.

They had some challenges with the seat-back video system (imagine 14 hours without any entertainment!!) so they rebooted the system. We were all highly amused to see the Windows CE boot screen and diagnostics on each screen as it tried to crawl its way back to life. To our great relief, it finally worked.

I watched The Campaign (awful!!), Hope Springs (amazing!), and started 3 other movies, but found that my usual challenge of falling asleep watching movies in dark spaces was actually a godsend. With each of those final 3 movies, I fell asleep within minutes of starting them and woke up long after each finished. When I finally woke enough to think straight, I tried to guess how far into the flight we were. At that moment, they turned on the lights to serve breakfast and I checked my watch--only 2.5 hours left! Awesome.

The one huge disappointment was the food. We had ordered gluten-free as the closest possibility to our grain-free lifestyle. For some reason, they translated gluten-free into "Vegan tasteless mush plus a gluten free brickette of a roll, complete with margarine". (The standard meal was beef stew, mashed potatoes, and butter....I ate Christopher's!) For breakfast, gluten-free equaled "fat free egg white scramble plus gluten free brickette of a roll." Worst airline food I've had in many years. Will definitely cancel the special meals on the return and just eat the miniscule amount of grain in the regular meal. Lesson learned.

We arrived in Auckland at about 5am. Took forever to get off the plane because of a problem with the skybridge, but otherwise a very easy passage through immigration, baggage claim, and customs. We were at the rental desk by 6am. Hertz rented us a brand new 7-seat Kia van, which is perfect.

I'll start a new blog post for the day in Auckland...certainly feels like a whole new day!