We had an alarm set of 03:45 this morning to make sure we got up in time to have a bite to eat and then head to the airport for our flight to Auckland at 07:05. I had a bit of muesli and was ready to go. We walked over to the station and waited for the very first train of the day, due at 04:28. It arrived and took us to Central where we changed for the airport train.
At the airport there was almost nobody around. There were no queues at all to get through security and passport control, so these took only a couple of minutes. Inside the terminal, many of the shops and food places weren’t even open yet, but we found one where my wife got a coffee. While she drank it, I noticed a large group of people clustered around a departure gate near us. Looking up to the indicator board I noticed the flight from that gate, to Denpasar in Bali, was shown as cancelled. There was an announcement over the PA system that all passengers for the flight should assemble at the gate for news regarding their flight, which had been cancelled to to “an ongoing incident in Bali”. When the passengers began to disperse a few minutes later we heard them saying that it was due to a volcanic eruption.
Fortunately this didn’t affect us. We boarded our plane in the last group since we were right near the front. Oddly, the row we were in had no window on our side for some reason, although there was a window on the opposite side. But once the plane had loaded we were happily surprised that nobody had been assigned the “window” seat next to us, so we had three seats for the two of us.
The flight was very short, at just under three hours in the air, plus taxiing time at each end. They served a full breakfast however, and I had a potato frittata with beef sausages. The flight was barely long enough to watch a movie, so I instead chose to start watching episodes of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series. I just managed to fit two episodes in and I thought they were fairly good.
We landed in Auckland at 12:05 local time. The airport was not busy at all, and again we had no queues for either passport control or customs, and were out into the arrivals lounge in just a few minutes. However while traversing the terminal we kept hearing a warning over the PA system that we might be instructed to evacuate the area. When we reached the public area, we noticed large groups of people clustered around the escalators up to departures, and staff holding them back. There was an announcement about people not being allowed into the departures area.
My wife got another coffee from a cafe in the terminal and then we walked over to the shuttle bus area to get a lift to our car ire place. Soon a van arrived and the cheerful driver took us out to the car pickup spot. We checked in there and collected our car. The woman saw our Australian driver’s licences and was pretty casual and friendly with us about the whole thing. At the same time another woman at the next counter was serving an American couple and explaining very carefully a lot of things about driving in New Zealand.
We loaded our bags into the car and drove off, heading into central Auckland to pick up my wife’s mother and sister (our recent travelling companions in Japan!) from their hotel, where they’d been staying for a couple of days already. We had some trouble picking them up, because the street their hotel was on was full of parked cars. I tried doing a U-turn to grab a spot on the other side, but as I was in the middle of turning another car on the there side grabbed the spot! So we had continue straight and circle around the block, which took a long time because of some very slow traffic lights. By the time we’d done that there was a spot free where I pulled over so we could load their bags into the car and all climb in.
From there we headed out of Auckland, heading north on highway 1, over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We proceeded until we’d left the outskirts of Auckland, and then exited the highway at the first town past the toll road section, a small place named Warkworth. It was after 14:00 and my wife and I needed some lunch, since this corresponded to midday in Sydney. We parked near some shops and walked across a small bridge to a larger shopping area. I found a bakery that sold “award winning” pies, so I got a chicken, spinach, and feta pie and also tried one of the delicious looking walnut tarts (which was indeed delicious). My wife didn’t fancy anything they had, so went for a walk to a supermarket she’d spotted to buy something. But she got lost coming out the other side and couldn’t find her way back to the rest of us for several minutes!
We continued north along the highway until we reached Whangerai, the largest place we’d been through since leaving Auckland. Our GPS navigation in the car told me to go a long way around it, but I thought we could just continue on, so I stopped at a tourist information centre to check Google Maps, and also to stretch my legs after well over an hour of driving. The map said we could indeed continue straight through the city, so we did that.
From there it was another hour to Paihia, the small town on the shore of the Bay of Islands where we are staying for the next two nights. We checked into the motel and then went to find my wife’s two nephews (her sister’s sons) and their partners, who had arrived shortly before us, having departed Auckland on the same drive a bit earlier than we did. The reason we’re all over here is to celebrate the 30th birthday of the older nephew, who currently lives in Auckland. They were having a drink at Zane Grey’s Restaurant and Bar, not far from our motel. In fact, everything in this tiny town is not far from our motel!
We’d arrived at 18:30, and the others were about ready for dinner, but my wife and I were still a bit full from our late lunch, so we said we’d walk around a bit and maybe do our own thing for dinner later, while they sat in at Zane Grey’s. So we went for a bit of a walk along the waterfront. We decided we could use a drink after the long drive, before thinking about eating, and that we may as well go back and sit with the family and have a drink while they ate. So we did that. Towards the end of them eating dinner, we decided we were ready for something light, and my wife suggested we split a vegetarian option version of the fish and chips that most of them were having – which was a beer-battered banana blossom with chips. She was intrigued by this and wanted to try it. It was pretty good, I thought.
We broke up after dinner, with the younger four heading to a bar for more drinks, while my in-laws headed back to the motel. My wife and and I went for a stroll through the shops and restaurants and I grabbed a couple of scoops of ice cream from Movenpick. I wanted a New Zealand ice cream, but this was the only ice cream place open.
Then we walked back to the motel for the night. On the way we crossed over the street to the waterside to stare at the stars for a few minutes, which were spectacular, since this area has very little human habitation and light pollution.
To an American, a three-hour flight isn’t “very short”. It would take me (a New Yorker) to 2/3 of the United States and also to [counts] about eight foreign countries (Canada and in the Caribbean, and also Greenland and Iceland). Only slightly longer flights would reach Mexico, Central America, and northern South America.
You saw that Heathrow is closed for days? Aren’t you glad you didn’t fly to the UK?
I hope you’re having fun.