Off at last!

Our flight has a very civilized departure of 9pm. The upside is, after a long dark flight we arrive in Auckland in the morning, with our body clocks pretty close to the wall clock time.

The downside is, since we pretty much packed yesterday, we had all day Sunday with nothing to do but wait to go! After our usual Sunday-morning coffee at the P.A. Cafe we killed a couple of hours by walking around Filoli.

Finally came time to leave. We had opted to treat ourselves to a non-shared ride for this long trip.

The International terminal was very quiet and check-in was low-stress. For us. The guy who had to hoist our larger bag maybe felt a little stress (but it wasn't over the 50Kilo limit, so there).

Air New Zealand offered us a "twin-seat" deal: for $60 extra we could have a three-seat row to ourselves. Although it's perhaps an admission by them that the plane is far from full, it's a creative way to deal with it, as opposed to letting the vacancies fall randomly.

Scheduled boarding is 8:15 for a 9pm departure. When we touch down it will be Tuesday morning—we'll have lost a Monday!

The New Cell Phone

We'd been worrying about cell phone service in New Zealand. We probably won't use one often, but we might need one for emergencies, or to call ahead for reservations and so on. There was some doubt the phone we had would work abroad.

Then, coincidentally and fortuitously, David saw an online review of a new, nice, inexpensive dual-band (GSM/CDMA) phone from Verizon, our cell carrier. So Saturday he trotted down to the Verizon store and got one.

It's a kind of nice maroon color. We've set up the display so it shows local time and Los Angeles time, both. Right now, they're the same. But in a week plus a day, they will show quite different times and dates!

The phone has a camera, but Verizon makes it almost useless. The only way to get a picture out of the camera is to send it in a special Picture Message, to one's personal Verizon album. That costs 25cents per picture domestic—I don't want to know what it costs from abroad. Log on to "My Verizon" and now you can send your picture from your album by email to yourself. That would be the only way of getting the actual picture to your computer.

Our Number Remains the Same

Anyway, bitchin' at Verizon aside, our cell phone number (387-3645) remains the same. It should be possible to dial it from the US and have it ring in New Zealand.

We are not actually planning to spend a lot of time on the phone, since the roaming charge is $1.99 per minute. But it's nice to know the ability is there.

The Purple Binder

As we run up toward departure day (just a week from today!) there's one object we obsess over. We must not forget to pack the Purple Binder!

The Purple Binder contains the fruits of literally hundreds of hours of Marian's work in planning this trip. It has details of every day's itinerary, cross-referenced to page numbers in the Rough Guide to New Zealand, and with URLs to websites as needed.

It has printouts of Google maps. It has printouts of websites. It has forms we've mailed to reserve different excursions.

This particular Purple Binder is a well-travelled binder. It served the same function for our trip to England in 2003. In fact, the divider pages in it still have words like "Oxford" and "Coventry" on them.

Must... not... forget... the Purple Binder!