It's quarter to 11AM on October 25th, and Jenny and I have safely made it to Auckland! On the flight from Calgary to Los Angeles, we ended up eating on the plane. Surprisingly, it wasn't a rip off! I got a Quizno's sub, chips, a pop, and a mini-bar bottle of J&B scotch for just $11.70. Air Canada has now bumped themselves up in my books. Where else can you buy liquor as part of a value combo? Maybe a McDonalds in Paris...

On checking in for our Qantas flight in Los Angeles, we found out we were not sitting together! The agent at the ticket counter was no help, but luckily we were able to talk to the agents at the gate. They managed to move us from the back third of the aircraft to the 1st row in Economy class. Not a bad upgrade! Based on the way that the gate agent acted, I don't think we even needed to pull the "honeymoon" line. From what I saw, they were able to accommodate everybody's seat change requests and had a sense of humour about it.

The flight down was nicely uneventful. Once we were aboard the aircraft, we traded seats with a couple right behind us with a baby who ended up playing peek-a-boo with Jenny towards the end of the flight. Although there was nothing spectacular about the flight down (no Business class upgrades this time), we had no complaints about Qantas.

I'm glad that I packed a change of clothes in my backpack. Soon as we landed in Auckland, I changed shirts and felt like a different person. Amazing how grungy you can feel after 12 hours straight on a plane, never mind a total of 16 hours of flying. We're just killing time right now in a coffee bar until our final flight to Christchurch. On arriving in Christchurch, we'll be picking up our campervan (kiwi for RV) and then stocking up for the next two and a half weeks.

We've bought a SIM card ($20 to unlock my HTC Touch Pro2 from Telus was well worth it) so we'll be able to text back home and post updates from the road. Til next time, here's us saying "Hi" from Auckland.