Thursday 26 December

I was up at 6.15am to do the final packing, followed by a good breakfast of steak and eggs. Not that I’m going to be starving over the next couple of days! Overnight produced a fresh dusting of a couple of inches of snow – very clean and pretty again. On the drive to the airport we saw several vehicles which had either come to grief in snowbanks or ditches, or finished up facing the wrong way on the side of the highway because they spun out; on the very icy roads, Steve said some people just take lane changes too quickly, with big deposits of ice on them, and lose control.

Dianne got me to the check-in with the bags and then paid for a porter – a very good idea because he took me through customs and then got rid of the bags. Yay! They’re checked through all the way to Rotorua! The little silver bag is battling on valiantly, despite its being mortally wounded and I will put it out of its misery when I get home (put it out to pasture for someone’s road trips where wheels don't matter).

When you go in, you go through US Customs because the gate lounges are all in US territory! This saves time when you get to a US destination so all I have to do is go to the airline lounge in LA with just my carry-on bag. The only thing I still need to do is to go to Virgin check-in at LA and get my boarding pass for Sydney and Rotorua.

I'm officially in the USA now, and there's the sun, beating down through the windows of the lounge. :) Breathe a sign of relief, Kitchener!

Downstairs at the gate lounges they're all squashed into not enough seating, noisy, crowded. Up here, there are a lot of people but it's not packed and plenty of spare chairs and tables around.

Behind me are sitting a very large man and a very large woman (Spanish) with a couple of teenagers, so you get to share in family squables!

When I checked into the lounge, there wasn't much available besides eggs, cereal and toast, etc. But that was only because they were getting ready to serve lunch. Now I've got a lovely fresh salad and a cup of green tea because I imagine it will be about 2.00pm before lunch is served on the plane.

Okay, so I had checked the board and it said “Delayed” 13.40; my brain said “12.40” (blame it on the snow), so I headed down towards the lounge for a good walk about 15 mins before the original time, only to find that I now had 90 mins still to wait. I did a little more walking around and found four fridge magnets (confession, I’m keeping the inukshuk) and then settled down in the next door gate lounge to wait and read, soon dozing off for a power nap.

After about 30 mins I really wanted something hot and fluffy and brown in colour but not one of those awful things they call “coffee” here. So about 500m down the trail I found something called a “French Vanilla” in a cappuccino machine. It was very hot, very fluffy, very very sweet but don’t ask me what it was! Oh well, it hit the spot and only cost $CA1.65.

As we walked across from the airbridge to the plane, there was a blast of freezing air, reminding me it’s still snowing outside. Now I’m sitting on the plane waiting for the final cattle class contingent to board and then we’re off to LA. Yay! If any flight was going to be late, this is the one where I have a big leeway, so it’s not a problem. Reading the local paper, there’s a lot of press on the ice storm effects; 300,000 lost power Sunday morning but there are still many thousands who are waiting for reconnection. Most power breaks were caused when trees broke in the winds and ice storm and crashed on power lines, already heavily laden with ice. Getting them to heated centres is crucial and they’ve been going door to door seeking out people who are still in the cold.

We finally started on our taxi run at 2.10; our ETA is now 16:34 in LA and my connecting flight leaves at 21.50, so plenty of time to get to where I need to and rest, eat, blog, etc. Runways appear not to have ice on them in the centre, but the sides are icy and then between runways everything is snowy. I watched the plane taxying behind us and it had a huge cloud of snow billowing behind the engines. I know the snow is lovely and fluffy and powdery now but after continuing snowfalls it will pack down and become hard.

Very pleasant flight. 

A good meal; fresh salad with beef, mash and vegies and a nice glass of red. I had a sleep for about an hour afterwards and woke with 2 hours to go to our destination. At 2.20pm we flew over Denver, Colorado, where one of our previous house sitter couples lives; not long after that the captain told us the Grand Canyon was below the left side of the plane. I could see some of it over the guy sitting at the window – even from this high up it’s huge! Believe it or not more food came out – chippies and a Lindt 70% dark chocolate bar; not half an hour later we got a little tub of delicious tangy fruit ice cream and a very large cookie (which I didn’t eat). The chips and chocolate are for LA between flights.

We landed at 4.00pm; I had to find the Virgin Australia terminal and check in and then find the other terminal where the gates are. It was good to be out stretching my legs, although my carry-on bag is quite heavy. Security was pretty busy with about 50 people before me but for LA that’s not really too bad. However, with no bags to check in, it was all quite easy.

There are a lot of young girls around, all college age, I’d say and I found out they’re cheerleaders who are going to London for a big game on New Year’s Day.

I got to a food hall and discovered that there’s free wifi here, so I won’t bother paying $US27 to go to the Air France lounge. I sat in the food hall for about an hour and then went for a walk to find the gate lounge and to inspect all the food places. I ended up back at the food hall after about half an hour, still not having found tea or fruit. A gentleman pointed me to a Starbucks along a different alley to where I’d been. I happened to have some old $US with me, so I bought an enormous cup of tea and a fresh banana for $4.47: at an airport, that’s amazingly cheap! So at 7.00pm I sat near Starbucks, plugged in to power and connected to wifi; the tea lasted me till I went for my walk to the gate lounge, plus a little of the chocolate. Right outside the window where I was sitting was a British Airways A380: one big puppy! I spent some time working on the photo book from our July trip.

We backed out right on time at 9.50pm; by now I was a little weary, having been up since 6.15am Kitchener time, 3 hours ahead of LA. Less than half an hour out there was already quite a bumpy stretch. I sat with a lady who is Canadian but has lived in Australia for about 20 years. Thankfully, she didn’t keep talking after we took off. After dinner, I settled down for sleep but didn’t sleep as steadily as I did on the way over. It was a good flight and I felt okay when we landed. I probably spent about 7 hours in and out of sleep.