Janjo & the Miscellaneous Children (opening for Edwin Fracas & the Shower of Bastards at the Tropicana Lounge this Saturday) dropped me off at the bus stop for stage one of my trip to Wellington, the trip to Hamilton.
Sadly, I was not able to find a Hamilton postcard; Most places were shut by the time I got there, though I was able to find a net cafe to print my ticket for the night bus. Normally the InterCity bus folks don’t care, they just look for your name on the list, but for the night bus to Wellington, and presumably for other night buses, they wanted me to have a printout.
Maybe it makes it easier on the driver?

The desire for a Hamilton Tourist-Type postcard was so that I could send it to the GIS Team at my former job, as we’d had … How to put this? … issues with jobs concerning the city.
Issues involving 200%+ utilisation weeks because someone promised something without checking with the folks who actually had to do the work.
Issues involving taking fit-for-task data and making it objectively & demonstrably worse, at the client’s request.
I could go on, but I won’t.

So, without a postcard, I tried something new in the selfie line; What do you think?

I prefer the first one my own self.

I had a 4½ hour wait in Hamilton, so I checked the movie theatre across the road from the transport station (which closed at 6pm, thank you very much Hamiltron) and found a conveniently-timed session of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, so ate up some time that way. The theatre even stored my pack for me; It seems that they get a lot of backpackers.

The bus eventually arrived, pretty much on time.
I’d opted for the Gold Class option, only available on a few buses, with wider & more reclining seats, in the downstairs portion of the bus. The steerage passengers went upstairs, but more on that later.
The whole reason I traveled from Tauranga to Hamilton was to intercept the night bus with the comfy seats; The train is inconveniently timed, and the bus options due south from Tauranga, while they would have done the job, did not offer as much of a chance of sleeping.

I think I fell asleep somewhere in Taupo; I do remember the approach to, and main street of, the town, but I don’t remember leaving. I recall bits of Turangi, a bit of the Desert Road (one of the nasty corners) and Waiouru, Palmerston North, and Bulls, where my seatmate got out and I was able to claim the window seat for the last snooze leg of the trip.
Took me a while to work out how to deploy the leg rest, and how to lie so that the lights of the oncoming vehicles didn’t hit me right in the eyes, but I slept pretty well, and got into Wellington in the cold grey light of pre-dawn.

Oh, remember those steerage passengers upstairs?
I’m pretty confident that an elderly couple sat in the Gold Class area without tickets, and possibly without realising it.
One of them sat downstairs, and the other upstairs, but came down at regular intervals; Basically, at every stop.
When a seat opened up, he took it.
The driver, he did not seem to care, or even notice.