The first couple of nights back in NZ, I didn’t sleep so well.
Sunday night, however, I must have finally burned through the adrenaline & excitement of Holiday 2014, because I went to bed at 7:30pm-ish, and resurfaced, unwillingly, at 10:30am, with a couple of wakeful periods, one long, one short.

“Short” was being woken by my phone, for a call from the luggage delivery people. My bag was in their possession, and would be delivered on the 0800h run from their facility, so the ETA for my parents was maybe 1030h.
Based on this, I decided on a moderate amount of sleeping in, followed by going to the parent’s place to wait for the bag.

“Long” was 0300-0500.
No reason, I was just awake. It happens a fair bit.

Got woken up by a phone call at what I assumed was 7ish, telling me that the bag had, inexplicably, arrived.
Turned out it was 1030h.

Still, I have my bag now, and am doing laundry.
So. Much. Laundry.

The plan for today was to have a low-pressure day, which is pretty much what happened.
The electrical system in the bathroom finally gave up the ghost (wire worked loose from the breaker was Jono’s guess), so the showering process involved a torch balanced in a toilet roll to bounce light off the ceiling.

I spent the morning packing my bag, which has changed over the trip from being very two full packing cells plus some assorted misc., to being one almost full packing cell in a bag otherwise stuffed with laundry.
I somehow managed to overestimate on t-shirts, and I didn’t buy that many while in London, so I’m not sure how that happened.

In an effort to get out of the apartment, we took a wander along the walking paths on the other side of the river, dodging the occasional cyclist & passing by some allotments.
Saw these yesterday from the train to Lucerne. Every allotment seems to have a good-sized shed, so they look like an overgrown trailer park at first sight. Many of the patches also have a flagpole, with a profusion of Canton & possibly Community flags.

Jono loaded me onto the airport train at Dietikon, & gave me a basic run-down of what to expect at Zurich airport, and it all turned out pretty much as described.
Mostly walking, though there was a little yodelling train which mooed.
They apparently loaded the soundtrack of Swiss Stereotypes for the train PA system.

I got there maybe 10 minutes before early check-in for my flight, but the process was so incredibly slow that I was in the queue for a good half-hour.
No idea why it was so slow; Many check-ins seemed to involve long conversations, explanations, or in one case a phone call.
Finding the appropriate terminal wasn’t a problem, and the hardest part was avoiding a visit to a Sprügli Chocolate Shop, for there were many of these emporia of weight-gain along the route.
There was a patch of excitement when my carry on got diverted to the other track at security, and nobody seemed very interested in telling me why for a few minutes. It turned out that there was too much stuff in there for them to get a decent scan.

(Also, I seem to have learned “Mine Deuche Nicht Gut; Sprechen Sie English” well enough to get the idea across; Most switch to English, or just ask “English?”, before I get through Sprechen)

Got a bit lucky with my seat for the Zurich-Dubai leg, window seat in a two-seat block with no neighbour; Not enough room to lie flat in Economy-Class Nirvana, but the was at least enough space to stack things I didn’t need.
The flight, however, hit a lot of turbulence, to the extent that they just didn’t bother serving hot beverages, because it wasn’t safe.

Dubai … I got to Dubai well before the gate, and therefore the section of terminal, was posted on the big-ass boards, so after a bit of ambling about I went & had breakfast at a Jack Daniels themed restaurant, partially because the omelette looked really good (and it was), but also because they had someone at the door who I could ask about which currencies they accept. (pretty much anything major, but you’ll get your change in dirham)

Dubai Terminal Three is divided into halls A, B, & C, and being in ‘A’, I was fully expecting to have to take the little train to ‘C’, which can take a while; Turns out the flight left from ‘A’, so it was just a matter of circling the hall until I hit the right gate. Unexpectedly convenient.

I ran into some LonCon folks who’d been staying at the same hotel as me while waiting for the gates to open; They’re on the same flight as me, though they’re getting off at Melbourne.

The Dubai to Melbourne flight started badly; Delays loading luggage meant a wait at the gate, and a fault in the air-con meant it was really warm. They eventually fixed the air-con, then loaded the luggage, finally pulled away from the gate, only to have the plane-pushing vehicle break down in front of the plane, so that it still couldn’t move.
When we eventually took off, we must have been at least an hour & a half late.

Right now my aisle-side neighbours, a couple from Australia from the sound of their accents, are asleep on top of each other, which will suck for them when I want to get up.
(Fortunately, they don’t seem to mind too much)

As a side note, Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works 85-92” makes for very relaxing travelling music, if you like that sort of thing; It’s on the aircraft entertainment system.

OK, glad that flight’s over, and I never want to do another flight that long again, or at least not in the window seat.
Had a case of restless legs for the last hour or so, which was less than fun.
I’ve performed the phone-sim-shuffle, so as to warn my ride from the airport that I’ll be late, and it looks like the mobile number for the UK sim was, in fact, on the sim itself. That was going to be my second port of call, if I’d not been able to find a way to get the network to tell me my number.

The transit through Melbourne was easy enough; The plane didn’t move, so we all filed off, through a security scan where they put me through the imaging scanner, and then back almost the same way I’d come to the gate lounge, which was, as near as I can tell, underneath the arrival hall.

Got into a level of misunderstanding with the other person on my row for the Melbourne-Auckland trip; She took my semi-coherent “I’m in the window seat, so if I go in first, you won’t have to move” for some sort of implication that she was going to take the window seat, or refuse to move, or something.
We sorted it out a bit later, while trying to figure out her best options for a really tight international connection at Auckland.
She’d had four hours to make her flight to Santiago, Chile, under the original schedule, but the plane was nearly three hours late on take-off, leaving her with 45 minutes to make a flight for which Emirates couldn’t issue a boarding pass, as it wasn’t one of their partners.
I’ve never done an International Transfer through Auckland, for fairly obvious reasons, so couldn’t give her many specifics, other than “It’s all one building, so security shouldn’t be an issue” and “There are signs for everything, so there must be signs for this too”. (There were; I did follow them for a while as the paths coincided, but then the path lead upstream through Duty Free, against the flow of other passengers, towards the other end of the building. I did get a chocolate from one of the Duty Free bods though.)
My advice was to be the first one off the plane & snag anyone official-looking who wasn’t wearing an Emirates uniform, on the grounds that they’d be an Auckland Airport employee, and make yourself their problem; I’ve seen people rushed through lines & sped around on the little battle-hardened golf carts, so this was surely the time to make that happen.
She took the advice, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether she made it.

I had a brain fade & pulled my passport from the reader too soon, so had to go through an actual manned booth instead of the SmartGate, adding almost thirty whole seconds to the Passport Control process.
Sadly this was not the end of my problems, though at least I didn’t cause the next one.

There was an Emirates Staffer asking people’s names at the baggage carousel, and when she found me on the list, she had some bad news.
Remember those luggage-loading delays at Dubai? It’s fine if you don’t, I’ll wait here while you check back a few paragraphs.

OK, so the problem was apparently a burst pipe; No idea whether it was water, wastewater, or hydraulic, but the result was that some luggage never made it onto the plane, including mine.
To their credit, Emirates already had a list of the affected passengers, and had set up a wee processing area with a document wallet for everyone already printed & the company who’d been delivering the bags on-site. Far as I’m concerned, while it’s annoying, they were handling the problem well.

No problems at Biosecurity, despite having been out in the cheap showyness of Swiss nature, and having forgotten about a little wooden promotional thing from the Wrocław EuroCon Bid people; My shoes were clean, and as far as they were concerned, by the time you can laser-cut a piece of wood, it’s processed enough to be safe.

Rain during the pick-up process didn’t help, but I found a covered spot from which to watch for the arriving parent mobile, and with only my carry-on, diving into the slow moving traffic for a quick getaway was pretty easy.
(To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the drive by; I’d thought it more likely that I’d get through to the arrival hall & get a text message saying “I’m upstairs in the little cafe, where there are chairs and fewer people”.)

And that’s basically it.
I zoned out a bit on the drive back to the parents, but perked up while I was there, so drove back to ‘my’ place at Waiwera in what I think was a safe manner.

A final thing, or things;
This is what you walk through when you get off the plane, before you get to Duty Free or Passport Control or You Ain’t Got No Luggage or anything.

When I talked to the passport control guy after I failed to follow the instructions for the SmartGate machine, once he’d scanned the passport & approved things, he said “Welcome Home”.
After a series of flights that long, it was a surprisingly nice thing to have someone say.

It took me a couple of hours to get back to sleep after reading The Work Email, and then my alarm woke me 45 minutes later, in accordance with The Plan.
~sigh~
Getting into Zurich and onto a train to Lucerne was fairly easy, in that I followed Jono & he knew where the hell he was going, and in maybe an hour we were in Lucerne, where the weather was looking pretty good.
Our original plan had been to potter about in Lucerne, take the ferry to Alpnachstadt, and the cogwheel train up to Pilatus-Klum. (We figured this out last night, while swearing at the Pilatus website, which does not have an easily-accessed map or diagram saying where the various features/places used to describe the transport options actually are)
Thanks to the weather, we decided to get a train to Alpnachstadt & go up the mountain sooner rather than later, to take advantage of the clear skies, though we did take the time to walk across the Chapel Bridge.

 

There was a slight cock-up with train timings, where two number were accidentally transposed & we missed the train we’d intended to take, but since our tickets were from Dietikon to Alpnachstadt by way of Zurich & Lucerne, that just meant getting on the next one, and we made it just in time to get on The Steepest Cogwheel Railway In The World. It did not disappoint.
The train car is stepped, much like the Wellington Cable Car, but more so; There’s no aisle, and you enter from the stepped ‘platform’.

The way up is quite scenic, I suppose.

In the fullness of time, and after a delay to let the descending trains past (it’s single-track for most of the way, and the points might just be sections of track which can move sideways while the train is on it), we got to the top of Pilatus, Pilatus-Klum.

 

The first thing to do was book/reserve our trip down, so we gave ourselves a couple of hours & found a walk which could be done in the available time; There was a choice between the Tischenhorn, the highest point, or the Mattenhorn, which is lower & a bit further. We went with Tischenhorn, as it was slightly shorter at 35 minutes one-way, and did not involve descending into a valley. The Matenhorn, by comparison, had an uphill climb at both ends, which looked unpleasant.
(The second thing was putting on my warm jacket; Turns out that 1500m vertically makes a big temperature difference)

This is a hotel. A monumentally expensive hotel, which makes it basically OK from a Swiss pricing point of view.

 

If you squint just right, you can see the path we took heading out to the left of the picture; You walk past the hotel & keep going.

It’s possible to walk up. Also down, but that, I think, would be annoying; Up is easier, I find.
There’s a walk which takes you to the peak over yonder, but as it was uphill in both directions, and the weather was closing in, we elected to go for something shorter.

It wasn’t open while we were there, but there’s a gondola which comes up the other side of the mountain, so that you can do a round-trip.
Or could, if it weren’t the off season.
Maybe if I go back, and do the walk up from the lakeside, I’d take the gondola down.
It’s a hell of a view, and a hell of a long way down.

 

Oh, and the view goes on … Pretty much forever, as Jono is demonstrating.

Vertigo was kind of kicking in here, so this grin was probably the last one before we reached the local summit; Everything else would more accurately have been a grimace.

 

Looking back along the trail, back to where there was safety, and guard-rails.
OK, it wasn’t that bad. While steep, the drop-off was probably survivable, if fantastically unpleasant, and the view was good.

Cloud was banking up against the other side of the mountain, as Jono is demonstrating here.
The path actually cut through the ridge to the other side for a while, and from memory, on the spot just in front of Jono, it drops away on both sides, so for a brief moment you’re on the ridgeline.

This, as near as I can tell, is part of the view from the top, and it’s a fantastic view, well worth the climb.
And the vertigo.

The walk was, I think, close to the limits of my ability to do heights. If the guard wires weren’t there I doubt I’d have been able to reach the summit, but I did; Sat there on the little bench, looking at the side where the air was clear & the mountain sloped steeply down to farms, with the faint clong of cow-bells rising up.
This meant that I was not looking at the other side, where the clouds blocked the view and mountain drops vertically into white nothingness, and was rewarded by an ambassador from the wildlife of Pilatus, who wanted to have a word about our lunch.

The views are amazing, and I’m glad I was able to do the walk & see them.
I’m equally glad that there were well-formed paths, as seen here;

Somewhere along the way there we were lucky enough to see a Brocken Spectre, though my photo is not very good.

We made it back in enough time for Jono to consider one of the other peaks (I took one look at the stairway & decided that one was enough), before deciding that the stairs were kind of uneven, & that he didn’t really feel like climbing them.

The clouds closing in and obscuring the top didn’t help.

We got the little train back down, and I managed to get quite a good seat, just behind the driver.

We passed by some magnificently uninterested cows on the way down, complete with alpine cowbells.

As we had the time, we took the ferry back, with the requisite spectacular views which are apparently just a thing around these parts.

Back in Lucerne, we wandered through the old town & eventually found an access onto the old walls of the city which wasn’t blocked by construction, and climbed a guard tower.
There’s a good chunk of the old city walls left, admittedly with the odd roadway cut through them, and at some point I’ll upload my photos of them.

The plan for Tuesday is a trip to Lucerne, or more accurately through Lucerne, to go up a mountain in a cogwheel train from Alpnachstadt. Or something like that.
I’m leaving the rest of the place names out for now, and will hopefully fill them in later, because the chances of me getting them right are close to nil thanks to them being in German, and cut/paste is kind of a pain on an iPhone.

The majority of today was quiet & uneventful.
There was a quick trip to central Dietikon (the other side of the train tracks) so that Jono could get some documents notarised at the official document-notarising place; We got there just before they closed for lunch.
Apparently every office & business in Switzerland closes for lunch at the same time, aside from the restaurants. This sounds massively inconvenient, and I get the idea that it is massively inconvenient if you’re a working type.

There was also a trip to the supermarket, where I was defeated by the produce-weighing machine.
The idea is that you type in the identifying number of the fruit/vegetable in question, and it weighs it & prints a label. Not reading German, I went with the number on the sign which seemed to be closest to the thing in question, and the first time it seemed to work; Brought up a picture of some apples and everything.
It turns out that the picture is advertising, had no relationship to the code, and was just a fluke, which left me very confused the next time I tried.

It’ll be an early start on Tuesday, which is being hampered by having woken up at 3 and checked my email, to discover an update from work. It’s not a good update.
It turns out that the Perth office did a major re-shuffle, and got rid of the GIS team entirely. No word on the rest of the team, however much of it was left, but the Alleged Manager will be coming to New Zealand.
Auckland, specifically, to join the GIS team here.
I’m a bit hazy on how the rank & seniority systems work, but it get much looks like I’ll end up working under the direction of the same person who helped make working in Perth so unpleasant. I’ll certainly be in the same team/office/set of desks.
This is not really something I needed to know while on holiday, and right now I can’t get back to sleep. My blood pressure’s gone so high that my ears are ringing, and I’m having to resist sending a response email saying, politely, “Thanks for letting me know; I quit”.

They really like church bells here.
A lot.
The double-glazing takes out a bunch of it, but there’re a lot of bells out there.

Not a lot happened today; Jono & I went into … place starting with an ‘H’ on the rail line to Zurich … to see Guardians Of The Galaxy, in both 3D and English, with German & French subtitles. I’d already seen it, but it’s a good film, and Jono wanted to catch it before it left the cinemas.

A quiet day.

There’s a chance that the Internet will stop working sometime this evening, so this may well be my last post for some time, depending upon access to public wi-fi.

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Oh, and there’s this thing, in Dietikon.

There was, initially, a plan to visit a park based on an old landslide which had become vegetated, with the possibility of Bears and Wolves, but this ran hard up against Jono’s need to get rid of furniture, so we went wandering along the river instead, surrounded by the cheap showyness of nature.
Also cyclists.

There had been rain up-river, so the water was kind of brown, making for an interesting effect where another river joined the flow.

Not sure how far we walked, but it was a reasonable way, and we were circled by a very circumspect duck while eating lunch, doing the “Oh No, I’m not eying up your lunch! Perish the thought! I’m just looking for … gravel. Yes, that’s it; Yummy gravel.” thing.
It eventually gave up & swam off in a huff.

On the way back, having stopped off for ice cream from a supermarket (where they were giving away chocolate at the checkout. Jono had to translate, as I had no idea whether what the checkout lady was saying was even directed at me, or whether it was a question, let along what said question was), we spotted this sign.

I got nothing.

There were electrical shenanigans in the evening, when the moving of something in a cupboard moved a presumably loose wire in the breaker panel, and made an odd collection of lights & power sockets stop working.
That was exciting, and involved the running of extension cords to make the TV go, and some improvisation with a torch to get some light into the windowless bathroom.

Not the sort of thing that you’d want to be dealing with in the last few days of occupying an apartment.