New Zealand Epilogue

Well we have now been home for almost three weeks and it seems ages ago that we stepped on the small plane from Kaitaia to Auckland.

Kaitaia Airport terminal is not much bigger than my garden shed and of course quite quick to check in but they were not trained or had security in place to allow you to check in baggage right through to London.

The flight was about forty minutes but you could not see too much, mainly due to the clouds whilst they also flew inland rather than over the Bay of islands which we had hoped for.

We arrived in Auckland with strong gusts of winds and then it was that Noel realised that there were two women pilots on board and not the one he saw when boarding. Somehow we made a safe but windy landing and arrived at the Domestic Terminal (Cheek! Why shouldn’t we land safely)! It’s only a short ten minute walk to the International Terminal where we checked in and very soon after arrived in the Air New Zealand Lounge where we spent a good five hours, time for a foot massage and a shower. Oh the joys of travelling in the front end of the plane.

The flight to Hong Kong went by quite quickly as we both slept a lot en-route although it was quite bumpy at times as a result of the cyclone in Eastern Australia.

Time for another shower in Hong Kong but then the flight was delayed for four hours as one of the food chillers had broken and with a fairly full flight they both needed to be working as food was needed on this twelve and a half hour sector.

We arrived home just in time for Jennifer to shower and change and join some other female residents at a Ballet night at Woking Theatre.

Noel spent the evening with Pizza and wine with Mike a good neighbour.

Since then we have just about come to terms with the time change and we both now sleep properly rather than having board meetings at two thirty in the morning with cups of tea.

We have spent some time playing with the finishing touches of the house, moving furniture etc but Noel spent almost two days on sorting out the post and filing away all the bits and pieces and paying the occasional bill.

We have learnt that Robin (of Robin and Lorraine fame) is in Kaitaia Hospital with Gall stones and we hope that he recovers very soon.

The weather since we arrived home has been quite good and warm but slipped back almost to winter in the past few days but the forecasters say that Spring weather is on the way.

Next week in London the G 20 Countries meet to decide our financial fate so let’s hope they can get it right, whilst there is currently no faith in the British PM getting it right.

Anyway it’s Saturday evening and the first Formula 1 Grand Prix is on tomorrow with two new ‘BRAWN TEAM’ cars on the first row of the grid. This will no doubt upset Mclaren and Ferrari. Ho Hum!

Anyway it was a really great trip