Sydney to Auckland

We find the days we have to make plane connections the most stressful. Today we fly from Sydney, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand. Our travel agent has arranged for a shuttle to pick us up at the hotel at 8:35 am for an 11:35 am flight. This is rush hour, but the trip to the airport is supposed to take just half an hour. It’s an international flight, so we are supposed to be at the airport two hours early.

We get down to the lobby and check out at about 8:25 am. We check with the concierge to find out where the shuttle stops. He tells us that the shuttle operator will come into the lobby and announce the shuttle. We build a small mountain out of our luggage in the lobby and sit down to wait. I pull out my book on Aboriginal Australians. It’s great for these occasions because it is written by an anthropologist and focuses a lot on things I don’t much care about, so I don’t mind being distracted when I read it.

My wonderful wife, however, does not wait well. She keeps looking up at shuttle like vehicles she can see through the glass doors in the lobby. Then she gets up to investigate.

After a couple of minutes she calls my name excitedly and tells me our shuttle is here, early. We grab our stuff and hurry out to the curb to be greeted by confusion. When the confusion subsides we learn that the shuttle causing the confusion is not our shuttle.

But we, and our mountain of luggage, are already at the curb. The concierge who told Miriam to come out is abashed, but we tell him “no worries” (proper Auzzies us) and start waiting at the curb for what we think will be about five minutes.

All of our shuttles and buses so far have come early or been on time except the one that picked us up at the Sydney airport.

We wait. And wait. And wait. At about 8:38 Miriam, who by that point is spinning around on the curb like a dust devil, goes back to talk to the concierge. He calls the shuttle and tells Miriam it is on its way. She comes back out, still nervous. At about 8:42 she can stand it no longer and goes back in. The concierge then tells her that the shuttle is actually on time, it’s just our confirmation that is in error. In fact, the concierge says, the shuttle isn’t due until 8:45.

So we wait on the curb. Have I mentioned that we walked a lot yesterday, there is something wrong with my shoes, and my feet hurt?

8:45 comes. 8:45 goes. The shuttle does neither.

Miriam is wearing a small depression into the sidewalk. I tell her to give the shuttle a few minutes after its adjusted arrival time; that we would not be worried if a U.S. shuttle was a few minutes late. It is about this time that we realize the shuttle company that picked us up way late at the Sydney airport is the same shuttle company that is supposed to pick us up and take us to the Sydney airport. This realization does not cheer us.

At 8:55, give or take a few seconds, I give Miriam a short briefing on the desirability of avoiding injury to the concierge during initial negotiations, and Miriam goes back in, armed with our itinerary and voucher. I wait on the curb, watch our mountain of luggage, and contemplate my feet.

A little after 9:00 she comes back out. The concierge has assured her that the shuttle is just around the corner, that our hotel is its last stop, and that we should still make it to the airport on time. She asked about just calling a cab, but the concierge said that the shuttle operator should arrive before a cab could.

At 9:05 I go in. The concierge informs me that the shuttle is still just around the corner, but traffic is still heavy. I enlist the concierge’s sympathy, and explain that, in my country, we would assume that the shuttle operator is lying and trying to cover up his tardiness. I tell him I think we should call a cab. He agrees that we can do that, but asks me to walk outside for just one more look. We do.

He looks down the trafficky street, spies the shuttle, tells us it is just in the next block, smiles and goes back inside. Miriam and I look hopefully down the street. We do not see the shuttle.

The shuttle does arrive, however, after a couple of light changes. There is barely room for our luggage and I need to take the dobro into the van. The van is nearly full and there is barely room to twist into our seats, but we are relieved and happy. The van pulls out and heads… to its next stop. People from the airport get off there. Thei luggage is, of course, at the bottom of the pile, so unloading takes a while.

By this time we have actually relaxed and are starting to laugh. We are in the hands of a higher power, and couldn’t get out of the shuttle without a pry bar anyway.

The trip only takes about 20 minutes, which means we arrive outside the airport about 1:50 before our flight. Ten minutes late; shouldn’t be a problem.

We walk inside the airport and see an enormous queue to get to the ticket counter. It has at least five switchbacks, and each is 2/3rds the length of the large building. I count over 80 people in front of us, and there are only four airline people working from the 16 counters. For the first half hour of our wait in the queue only three people are behind us. They are the other passengers in our shuttle.

It takes a little over an hour to get to the ticket counter. When we finally do they no longer have seats for us together, but the nice lady suggests we check at the gate. I haul my dobro to oversize check in, we grab our boarding passes, walk down a hall and face: another large queue for customs.

We get through it, then walk quickly through the truly huge set of stores, mostly duty-free shops, that are inside the Sydney airport between the check-in counters and the gates. We arrive with almost ten minutes to spare and breath a sigh of relief. I check at the gate and we are given seats together.

The flight itself is pleasant and uneventful. We arrive in Auckland, go through a large queue for immigration, collect our bags from the baggage counter, and go through customs. We are diverted to a special screening queue for biological hazards because I have marked “yes” on the customs form after the question that asks whether I am carrying hiking boots.

The biological hazards queue is the slowest moving we have encountered. We are directly behind a NZ couple returning from a golfing vacation. They are in the queue because the husband is carrying golf shoes. He is visibly impatient and upset. Apparently the queue usually moves very quickly. I wonder if it is the “Rogers Magic”

We finally get to the inspection point. My boots are at the bottom of my bag, which is on the bottom of our cart. I unbury my bag and fish one boot out. The lady looks at it and asks if the other boot is similar. I say, truthfully, “yes” and she tells us to go on ahead. I repack and we go off in search of the shuttle to our rent-a-car.

Our itinerary tells us that the shuttle for our rent-a-car operator comes every 20 minutes outside gate 8. However, we see a bunch of signs for shuttles pointing to places other than gate 8, and I make the mistake of asking at the information desk about our shuttle. The nice but befuddled older lady at the information desk has never heard of our rental car company, and sends me over to a section of the airport that has phones to call shuttles for hotels and rental cars.

As I probably should have expected, our rental company is not listed. I go back to Miriam, who is waiting outside near gate 8. By this time it is raining and blowing so hard that she needs to hold on to our bags to keep them from blowing away. When I first see her she looks like a sailor in a gale, struggling to keep from being blown overboard.

I tell her that I couldn’t find anything out, and we decide to wait through a 20 minute cycle. We begin to think dark thoughts about how tiny and crummy our rental car company must be that there is no mention of them in the airport. But a few minutes later a huge bus, with our rental car company’s name emblazoned on the side, pulls up.

The driver tells us the rental car center is closed, but it won’t be a problem. He is right. We are taken to a conference center that has all our information ready. It’s less trouble than renting a car in the States. We get a silver Mitsubishi somethingorother, a sedan about the size of a Toyota Corolla. We load our baggage.

We have directions to our hotel. It is simple. We turn right outside the conference center, then take the first left. When we are in the car, however, Miriam recalls that we take the first left, then the first right. She may have been right.

Anyway, with me chanting “stay left, stay left, stay left” we head out into the darkness. We drive for about 20 minutes through largely uninhabited areas, then stop and try to read the map. The map does not appear to list the streets we are on. We drive further, stop and ask for directions, and eventually get to our hotel.

The hotel makes us realize what fancy places we have been staying in. Still, it is clean, even if we do have to haul our baggage up a flight of stairs.

We have dinner at the hotel. The food is ordinary and overcooked, but we are ravenous and don’t care. The wait staff are all Maori women, and this makes us feel like we really are in New Zealand. Then we collapse.