Home again, home again – only til next week
The trip back to Auckland is easy and uneventful. Drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque for a slightly emotional farewell. Til next time which surely won’t be long. Tom has the travel bug too, and Stacy seems happy to indulge it. We talk of Tanzania, Zanzibar, South America and Scotland - the only limits are time and how to make the choice.
Processing at LAX has become an acceptable routine. Partial undress for security screening, boots off, jacket off, belt off, remove contents of pockets, laptop and other electronic devices. It looks like a unisex dressing room on the inside, but people are humorous and certainly look it! No worse than anywhere else. Perhaps easier than Heathrow, which always seems so crowded, chaotic and more visibly paranoid for some reason unexplained. There are never long queues land side in LAX. A man sporting an air of importance asks for the first class checkpoint and is pointed to the back of the 20 or so folks in the plebs line – ‘its all the same in here sir,’ like the cemetery I guess, no fast tracks or privileges for the rich.
I have no freebies for an airline lounge this time but spot a row of seats outside the doors to these exclusive havens and slightly removed from the rabble. It’s easy to hook into a wireless network, so the eeePC is in service again. Blogging on the go is great, and I never once had to resort to St**Bu*** to find access.
A few hours, supper, a movie and breakfast later I am in Auckland ahead of schedule at 5am. Always a busy time for arrivals, there are long queues at immigration and a long wait for bags. I fail to appreciate the logic of the latest so-called improvement in the terminal. Arriving and departing passengers were separated earlier. This doesn’t happen in LAX though I was told the rule originated in the US. This time, access to NZ immigration looks like its via the duty free shopping check outs – if you look hard enough there is a narrow channel that allows you to avoid this bottleneck with a purpose, but it sure ain’t easy to spot in the wee-small-hours-after-a-long-flight state of mind. That, and the removal of BNZ and self-service machines for departure tax are huge leaps backwards in my humble opinion. I forget to fill in a feedback form.
Outside kind friends await to run me home to Sunday morning Devonport where the cats are onsite and the boi is not. He’s in Wellington for a gig and we don’t connect til the following night. The slightly immoderate pile of purchases made it through with no bigger problem than carrying the weight from domestic to international terminals in LAX. That was my choice to walk rather than use the shuttle bus. Once home, they are thrown stright into the washing machine or the books for filing pile and I take off for coffee at The Stone Oven and a long walk on the beach. Life is back to ‘normal’ for the next week and a half. It’s a sunny winter morning – quite a come down from 109F and not unwelcome at that.
Processing at LAX has become an acceptable routine. Partial undress for security screening, boots off, jacket off, belt off, remove contents of pockets, laptop and other electronic devices. It looks like a unisex dressing room on the inside, but people are humorous and certainly look it! No worse than anywhere else. Perhaps easier than Heathrow, which always seems so crowded, chaotic and more visibly paranoid for some reason unexplained. There are never long queues land side in LAX. A man sporting an air of importance asks for the first class checkpoint and is pointed to the back of the 20 or so folks in the plebs line – ‘its all the same in here sir,’ like the cemetery I guess, no fast tracks or privileges for the rich.
I have no freebies for an airline lounge this time but spot a row of seats outside the doors to these exclusive havens and slightly removed from the rabble. It’s easy to hook into a wireless network, so the eeePC is in service again. Blogging on the go is great, and I never once had to resort to St**Bu*** to find access.
A few hours, supper, a movie and breakfast later I am in Auckland ahead of schedule at 5am. Always a busy time for arrivals, there are long queues at immigration and a long wait for bags. I fail to appreciate the logic of the latest so-called improvement in the terminal. Arriving and departing passengers were separated earlier. This doesn’t happen in LAX though I was told the rule originated in the US. This time, access to NZ immigration looks like its via the duty free shopping check outs – if you look hard enough there is a narrow channel that allows you to avoid this bottleneck with a purpose, but it sure ain’t easy to spot in the wee-small-hours-after-a-long-flight state of mind. That, and the removal of BNZ and self-service machines for departure tax are huge leaps backwards in my humble opinion. I forget to fill in a feedback form.
Outside kind friends await to run me home to Sunday morning Devonport where the cats are onsite and the boi is not. He’s in Wellington for a gig and we don’t connect til the following night. The slightly immoderate pile of purchases made it through with no bigger problem than carrying the weight from domestic to international terminals in LAX. That was my choice to walk rather than use the shuttle bus. Once home, they are thrown stright into the washing machine or the books for filing pile and I take off for coffee at The Stone Oven and a long walk on the beach. Life is back to ‘normal’ for the next week and a half. It’s a sunny winter morning – quite a come down from 109F and not unwelcome at that.
posted by Cathy Gunn at
June 16, 2008
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