I can’t entirely remember why this trip was divided into two days. It might be as simple as “that’s how the flight times worked out”, but it may also be that I wanted to try breaking the trip in Los Angeles.
Got to say, I don’t think it worked the way that past me intended it to work. Pretty sure it just spread out the jet lag and tiredness over 2 days, instead of concentrating the worst of it it into one.
My flight out of Auckland got canceled and rescheduled almost at the last minute by the airline, so the day before my flight I suddenly found that my intended four and a half hours of chilling at the terminal after returning the rental car had shrunk to one and a half. No idea why.
I didn’t have a lot of luck understanding what the official folks were asking me on the international part of the trip. Got there in the end, but they have a knack of asking questions that sound like they mean something else, at least to me, probably because I don’t understand the context & have no idea why the check in person wanted to know how I would be leaving LA, not how I would be leaving the USA.
Similarly, in the stopover in Fiji they asked (once with so much background noise from an actual ukulele duo that I couldn’t hear the question) whether I’d bought anything outside the airport, which again, made no goddamn sense to me. I think they meant did I buy anything in Fiji that I’m taking to the USA, and that seemed to be confirmed by my confused responses. They may not have meant that, because the first time it was asked I was on the queue of people who had just gotten off a plane from New Zealand, but it was a generic transferring to the USA line, so maybe it’s asked of anyone who might have left the airport to spend money in Fiji.
But it seemed like a very confusing question; do they mean in this country on this trip, prior to my flight to Fiji, over the course of the last 50 years of my life? I did attempt to ask clarifying questions, but all I got was more specificity on the bit I already understood, and not on the context which might have helped me to accurately answer the question.
I slept right through my alarm, which was not the plan, but fortunately only by an hour. Never really needed to before, but the next time a situation like this comes up, I think maybe I should arrange for a wake up call with the hotel front desk.
Turns out that when there is sufficient motivation and I haven’t really unpacked anything, I can shower dress and pack my bag in about 30 minutes, so that’s a good thing to know. Free or included Hotel breakfast can always be a bit of a crapshoot, and on this occasion it was kind of crowded in there, so I grabbed some coffee and a bagel from the only station with absolutely no line, then checked out and took the shuttle back to the airport. I think I was the only non-air crew person on the shuttle when it left my hotel, though we did pick up a few more actual passengers at the other Hotel it visited.
The initial plan had a smidge over an hour between flights in Las Vegas, but a delayed flight out of LA shrunk that to about 20 minutes. Fortunately, the airport at Las Vegas isn’t huge, so I was able to get there in the allotted time. Just.
It did involve some veering around groups of slow-moving people, and I’d have to say that even though it is 100% thematic of the city, those airport terminal concourses would be a great deal easier to navigate if they were not narrowed by the banks of poker machines.
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