August 18, 2006
After a somewhat sleepless night, I arrived in Auckland at 5:30 am. It took 2 hours to clear customs. After running the (half mile?) distance to the domestic terminal with all my bags on a cart and pulling my bike box behind me, my 7:50 flight to Christchurch had been cancelled because a bird was sucked into the engine. Well at least I got my morning workout!
I caught a flight 2 hours later and arrived in ChCh around 11. It was quite chilly - 5C. I am definitely not in the California summer anymore! I had a great taxi driver (in my experience all Kiwi taxi drivers are great) who took me to Bas and Lyneke's house (see photo), which is 100 yards from the ocean and 2 km from a 50m pool that was used for the Commonwealth Games once! Bas and Lyneke are biking in Australia until the end of September so I'm renting their house. Their friend Paul let me into the house and showed me how to turn on the gas heater (very important for survival!).
I had a second wind by then so I took the bus downtown (30 min ride) and opened my bank account, bought groceries etc. Then I came home, put my bike together, made dinner and went to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment