Up and out by 7am and a short drive to drop off the hire car at Christchurch Airport. It’s been a good car, if a little heavy on juice. All checked in fine and waiting board on time for 9am. Unfortunately there was no direct flight from Christchurch so I had to go to Auckland first.
Couple of hours wait and then it was settle down for the long-haul to Los Angeles. This was a Qantas flight and well serviced with pretty good room in your seat. Fortunately there were still quite a few movies that I hadn’t seen which helped to pass the long 11 hour flight. If I tried to read I somehow got real sleepy after a short while, but then couldn’t sleep….so a movie marathon it was.
Got to LA without too much hassle and then it was a very quick turnaround to collect my bags and get through immigration and customs as it was only 1 hour before my connecting flight to Washington DC. My younger Brother, Rob and his family, live in DC so it was nice to be able to take the opportunity to say Hi for the weekend before moving on to Boston.
At LA airport I was pulled aside by customs who wanted to talk to me about the number of countries I had visited (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand) before entering the USA. It was one of those moments when you know you have nothing to hide but you start to worry about the plausibility of your story. The more I explained about eels and my trip the more it sounded like I was making it up……then you start to picture yourself in a prison cell for a few days before your story cab be corroborated. Fortunately the chap seemed genuinely interested and waived me through with no problem.
Back on board another plane and a restless 5 hours (I was surprised at how long it took us to fly across the states) to DC. I was very glad to get off the plane.
My brother and his son, Ronan met me at the airport and whisked me the 30 minute drive back to the house. It was great to catch up with brother, nephew and my sister in Law, Maddy.
Being a Friday, everybody was weary so we had some take-out food, chatted a bit and all went to bed.
After 24 hours on the road and precious little sleep, I was dead to the world by the time my head hit the pillow.
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