I left out a few train stations along the way
Leaving Auckland wasn’t as calm as I’d hoped it’d be, annoyingly. Some idiot had handled the fuel nozzle at the petrol station with paint on their hands, so I was returning a rental car while trying not to get bright yellow paint all over everything I touched. Then I got a notification from my NZ bank about a suspicious transaction, which I didn’t recognise & blocked. Figured that’d be the end of it, but no, the bank fraud team needed to contact me about it, or maybe about locking my card, and I was going through the very crowded & busy airport security at the time, so couldn’t really do anything about it while my phone exploded.
I think that the situation at this point is that the NZ card is locked, which is fine by me, and I’ll need to call them at some point to unlock it, but that can quite frankly wait until I’m more awake.
All told, not the most relaxing departure, but at least there were Buzzy Bees.
The actual flights were fine, and for a lot of it I had WiFi access, so my ability to post stupid content to the internet was unimpeded.
Flight #1: 10½h from Auckland to Singapore. I had an aisle seat in the centre row, with a couple in the other two seats, so no need to get up to let them out or anything. There were a few very bumpy moments, one of which was sufficiently bad that a cabin crew member dropped into a squat position by her rolling cart thing in the aisle for stability. ( I just knocked back my drink so that it wouldn’t spill )
No need to change terminal at Singapore, so I had some time to wander around & try to get some feeling back in my legs & spine.
Flight #2 was scheduled for 14 hours, but came in a bit less than that. This time it was an aisle seat at one side, again with a couple beside me; Unexpectedly, from what I could tell they never left their seats for the entire flight; One of them slept pretty much the entire flight.
By the time I was off the plane I could definitely feel the lack of sleep; Got some naps in on the flights, though no idea how much, and it was nowhere near enough.
Also, my eyes were very irritated by the flights, which is a new one on me.
Getting through the arrival process took a while, though some of that was me taking my time with it because I was very tired. Some more was an enormous number of people waiting for their bags & packing out the area around the carousel, and a little bit was me changing into slightly warmer clothing for the next bit.
Noticed the temperature change as soon as I left the terminal building, mostly because I could suddenly see my breath in the air.
Luckily, no problems getting to the friends place where I’m staying. Trains were all running, didn’t fall asleep and miss my stop at any point, and I was finally able to take a shower.
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