NZ Trip Day 1

Why is it that you can never sleep the night before you have to get up obscenely early to go somewhere?

I woke up nearly every half hour, and lay awake from 4:30am through tll 10 to 5 when I figured there wasn’t any point waiting the last ten minutes for my alarm.
I actually managed to get everything together and get myself ready with plenty of time to spare, and got to the airport fine.
It was quite a nice fine clear morning in Canberra – unfortunately it was rather crappy in Sydney, and pretty much anywhere that wasn’t Canberra – as we flew pretty much the whole trip to Sydney in a depressing damp grey shroud.
There was a fair bit of turbulence on the way in to Sydney too – infact I was feeling rather sorry for myself and not looking forward to the prospect of hopping straight on to another plane. Especially not since the plane to Wellington was only a 737 which pushed the travel time closer to four hours…
I was especially overjoyed when they warned us before boarding that the flight was very full, and that anyone with bulky carry on luggage should give it to a flight attendant to stow.
But fortunately it wasn’t that bad, and I had more room than on the Canberra – Sydney flight, as there was an empty seat next to me.
Had a nice Chicken thing for lunch, and watched the movie.

The movie being Spiderman 2 – which was rather awful. The first one was pretty good, but that was just laughable in a lot of places – the stopping the train bit was pretty bad (the train’s buckling under the straing, bits of buildings get ripped off, but it STILL doesn’t slow down), and probably the most ridiculous moment was the 3 year old kid hoisting Peter up in the burning building…ugh…but anyway, it was something to do, but I probably would have been better off just reading my book.

We flew in to Wellington from the south, and got a brilliant view of the top of the South Island as we flew over Cook Straight
But as we approached Wellington, I noticed there was something wrong.
I was seeing the sun reflected off the water, and the sky was still blue.
I almost wondered if I’d got on the wrong flight or something….but nope, it was actually fine and sunny in Wellington (I have proof!). I think this is the first time in my memory that I have seen the sky in Wellington – and the tops of the hills too for that matter…heh

gah!, Craig’s computer just crashed so I lost half of what I was going to say.
Can’t be bothered retyping it so I’ll sumarise.

The trip up to Wanganui was pretty pleasant, it was rather suprising how completely familiar everything was – I knew exactly where I was going and recognised everything, even though it has been 9 years since I have been in the country (and did not travel that particular road when we were here that time), and 12 since I’ve lived there…
I found Craig & Estelle’s place fairly easily, and arrived there at about 8:00pm NZ time.

Photos are here

There’s also a short movie of the Wellington coast stuff – but at the moment it’s a 20Meg quicktime…I’m going to see if I can find a way to compress it a bit before I upload it.

Anyway, that’s all for now, today I’m going to wander around Wanagnui a bit, I’ve been remembering all sorts of places I want to see or get pictures of…