A Waka Rererangi is a canoe in the sky - an aeroplane in the Maori language - according to Air New Zealand’s whimsical flight safety briefing. And so we embarked on the final 14 hour leg of our journey to Auckland. Our transfer at Houston had been just as bad as we feared; there was a huge queue at security on arrival, which used up an hour and a half of the two hours forty-five minutes between our arrival in Houston and our onward transfer. And that was departure time, not boarding time. It didn’t help that I simply couldn’t provide fingerprints as required at security. My fingertips are quite dry, so the border guard helped by giving me some hand gel. Even then I couldn’t seem to press correctly on the glass, so James kindly put his hand on top of mine to press it down. Needless to say James produced perfect fingerprints at the first attempt. We rushed to reclaim our cases, checked them back in, and then went through a different security area, which luckily was not too busy. And then we had one last dash to our departure gate. I honestly thought that we had missed our flight but we were relieved to see all of the passengers queueing at the gate as they started to board. We were both sweating like Elvis at one of his Las Vegas concerts by the time we got on to the plane. It was another Dreamliner, with the added excitement of the Skycouch, a new experience that we had booked for the first time. You have all three seats in a row, and the fronts of the seats can be lifted up to make a “couch” for sleeping on. The idea of being horizontal for the night time leg of our flight was very appealing to me, and indeed I found it to be very comfortable. I managed to get at least seven hours of sleep. Unfortunately it was not so comfortable for James, who is a longer person than me, and he ended up sitting upright for most of the journey.
Finally we landed in Auckland and after a bit of queueing we exited the customs area to meet Jamie. It was fantastic to see him.
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