Today I took care of final preparations for my trip to New Zealand tomorrow. Our flight leaves at 07:00 am, so we need to get up at 04:00, throw on clothes, and dash out the door to get to the airport! So we need to completely packed tonight.
I filled out my New Zealand Traveller Declaration form. It asked if I’d been to any other countries in the past 30 days, and for the first time in my life filling out one of these forms I had to say yes, since we only got back from Japan less than 3 weeks ago.
Because this trip is only three days long, I’m taking a lot less luggage than usual. As I was thinking where to put the toiletries, I had the sudden thought that I’d need to make sure I could access them easily on the plane. Because—and this is an automatic thought for an Australian traveller—of course I’d want to brush my teeth during the flight. Only after thinking this did I remember the flight is barely three hours long, and no, I don’t actually have to brush my teeth during it. When flying from Australia to almost anywhere else in the world, you definitely do need to brush your teeth, because you’re in transit for 12-24 hours or more.
In fact, we’re picking up a car at Auckland Airport and driving up to the Bay of Islands in the afternoon. The drive is going to be longer than the flight!
For lunch today I drove with Scully up to Allambie to get pies from the pie shop there. We haven’t been there for a while, and Scully likes to run around on the soccer field next to where I sit on a bench to eat. And this afternoon we met my wife right after work to drive over to a friends’ place to drop Scully off for dogsitting. We wanted to do this early to get home and have dinner and then get to bed early before our pre-dawn start tomorrow.
Next blog entry will be from New Zealand!