So, moving on from the events in my last post, here we are in Auckland, following a few days in Surfer's Paradise in Australia with the Kiwi's parents. The flight over was a bit of a trial, 10 hours from Heathrow to LA, several hours in transit in LA whilst they do all the immigration nonsense, fingerprinting and photographing and such, even though we don't actually want to enter their daft country, including the comedy questionnaire which I might write more about in another post.
Next, 11 or 12 hours over to Auckland, then a couple of hours wait before a 3.5 hour trip over to Brisbane, where Mr Kiwi met us to drive us down to Surfer's. Fortunately my wonderful girl had upgraded us to business class for this leg, so we spent the time stretching out in their first class seats, drinking all sorts of nice stuff and eating as well as you can on a flight, I reckon. Being in front of the engines makes the whole thing a lot less stressful: quieter and, I reckon, less vibration. We checked out the price of the full trip in business, and it would have cost about three times the price, possibly not entirely worth it even so...
Anyway, superb couple of days in Surfer's, beach, pool, restaurant, boat sort of stuff, we treated to the best the place had to offer by the folks and shook off the tiredness of the journey and the pallor of London in a few days. We arrived in Auckland yesterday afternoon and met up with a few friends, tonight we'll be seeing a whole lot more of them after spending the day researching places to live in this city. We'll be moving here within the year, so this is an essential bit of orientation for us both, as I've only ever spent a couple of days here and she's not lived here in seven years.
Paul's funeral is at 0020 tomorrow morning NZ time (1120 Thursday GMT). It's slowly been sinking in over the past few days, has thrown a lot of things into sharp relief for me. I'll be sure to take a moment whilst it's all going on - it's still hard to find any words to make sense of this.
More on our travels when I get the chance - we're rarely in one place for that long but some of our places advertise wi-fi so I'll do what I can.
2 comments:
Ah, business class. Only done it once but it was amazing. A real tablecloth on your fold out table, proper wine, and room to stretch your legs. Bliss.
A close friend of mine died 9 years ago now and I remember trying to make sense of it at the time and not getting anywhere. I hope you manage a bit better than me and your quiet time helped.
On a lighter note, I've been looking at your tags. I think it's a shocker that work and dublin (which after all is work-related) come way higher up than friends, holiday and wine. Your move to NZ seems well overdue!
Thanks for writing this.
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