Many, Many Miles

Larry and I flew out of Bozeman mid-day Thursday the 10th and arrived in San Francisco without incident. We had a 6-hour layover there so we went downtown, as I had never been to San Fran before, nor even California for that matter, and neither of us wanted to sit in the airport for that long. We had some Mexican food on Powell St because we likely wouldn't have any for awhile, and just wandered around. As it turned out, Larry and I were behind a girl from Gardiner, Montana in the security line. She was also flying to Auckland, then had a connecting flight to somewhere else in New Zealand. We chatted and had a beer with her before the flight. This situation was oddly familiar (see post "Finding My Way To School" from Sept 2008).

The flight across the Pacific was exactly as expected. We left San Francisco at 7:45 pm, 2/10 and arrived at 5:10 am 2/12. It took 13 hours. I'm still troubled by the idea of an entire day just not happening, for me anyway. I watched three movies in this time, and slept roughly 2.5 hours, mostly tossing and turning. We arrived in Auckland and promptly went through immigration and customs because we again had a long layover. We spent the morning downtown, which we found to be asleep. A guy in his mid-20s from Cali wandered around with us, with a chief goal of finding a decent breakfast. By mid-morning we had done plenty of walking and decided to rest in a park by the University of Auckland. I passed out on a bench for about half an hour.

Please forgive me, any Kiwis that happen to read this. Auckland was a lovely, clean city. However, when I am traveling, time doesn't really exist after awhile, and everything is sort of hazy, like I'm in limbo. Also, some of its features struck me as a bit odd, such as the fact that NOTHING is going on before 11:30am. Thus, I will likely have a skewed opinion of the city. For now anyway.

We got back to the airport and flew to Brisbane on a seemingly instant four-hour flight. Again in typical Nate fashion, besides scheduling a trip with weird long layovers, leaving all the airports for wandering also meant that we had to go through security three times and immigration twice. Jeff Ihle, the brother of my family friend Beth Ihle of Townsend, had arranged to meet us at the airport, and got there with his son Austin about 15 minutes after we landed. So far, we've just been relaxing and getting adjusted to Oz at his house, which has a great view of some wooded hills. We were woken up Sunday morning by screeching Kookaburras.

I'll also note that the previous post "Delirium" was written in the Auckland airport after many, many hours and many, many miles. I wrote it after lying down on a bench underneath a large tree with constantly changing colors and projected images of birds and fish. It also apparently played the soundtrack from Jurassic Park, or at least the sound effects. When I finally went to bed Saturday night, I had been up for 46 hours save for the lousy sleep on the plane and the park bench nap.