Getting There

Yay - so after so many months of planning we are finally well and truly on our way! Some last minute shopping by Shona and a spanner in the works by mortgage refixing wasn't enough to stress us out on our last day in Auckland - as even Michael finally allowed himself to get excited. At the airport in plenty of time we both hoped for a pleasant, relaxing and stress free trip to our first proper destination -NYC. Naivety is a wonderful thing sometimes -especially when you're about to go through LAX, but we both managed to get some rest on the first leg while watching movies -'He's just not that into you' and 'Confessions of a shoppoholic' by one of us 'Watchmen' and 'Twelve Rounds' by the other. If you can't work out who watched which -you've obviously stumbled across this web page by accident hope you enjoy it in any event. The flight was made infinitely better by the fact that Mike pulled off a masterstroke of manoeuvring to take us from a full row of four, to a row of four for the two of us. This came about when one of the four went up the plane two rows and Mike 'went to have a look out the window' from a vacant row of 3.. a beautiful bargaining chip for the remaining passenger -David the flaming ginger from Te Aroha. With the plane arriving early in LAX, we had just on 2 hours to make our connecting flight easy right? Wrong. When we got to the immigration line and were told that the computers were down, we knew we were going to have some fun on our hands. Boarding time arrived and were still well back in the line, pretty much resolved to the fact that we'd be on a later flight. The announcement that our connecting flight was being held was a huge relief -and made the rest of the two hour wait in line much more pleasant. So after all the talk about the fancy procedures no fingerprints were taken and they have no photo of our new haircuts. The rest of the airport felt like running the New York marathon -complete with race marshals holding Qantas signs as we went zipping past. An uneventful second leg of our race got us to the detour at JFK where we took the 'Rail it' option and went by Air Train and subway to Manhatten Island. Shona was awesome and even gave directions to other people on the network! We jumped off at Chambers Street to see if Jason was still on the platform -then did a puddle jump three more stops to West 4th Station, where Mike was amazed to instantly recognise Jason's neighbourhood buildings from his visit in 2003, before momentarily heading off in completely the wrong direction! Not much time was lost and it gave us a first real glimpse of the activity on New York streets. Was wonderful to see Jason's head pop out of the spaceshoe house window -and a welcome gin and tonic and gin (!) calmed our nerves, before heading out for real New York pizza. The loft bed is super comfy and seems to hold us fine -we're up here at the moment lamenting the fact that Jason missed getting tickets to Shakepeare in the park, even though he joined the queue at 4am! Remember -the city never sleeps.