It’s that time of year again where we jet off to new adventures and hopefully better weather. We’ve spent the last 2 weeks looking after sister Jenny’s farm and it’s done nothing but rain.
Our Farm sit went smoothly apart from the black headed ram that terrorised us at every turn. This sheep is an escape artist. He knew all the loopholes between paddocks and made sure to terrorise us every opportunity (Mike, me and Rosa). Not only that, he terrorised the ducks and chickens as well!
But now, it’s time to leave all that behind. We thought we were organised, having packed our backs 2 weeks before starting the housesit. We’d weighed our carry on bags and we both had about 7 kgs each. But as the weeks went by, I’d been adding little bits to my bag. and when I weighed in this morning, it was 9kg! So a mad panic had me unpacking my bag and discarding 2 kg worth of stuff.
As I was loading my bag into Jenny’s car, Mike decided to slam the boot on my head. Okay, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds, just a sore head and neck and a headache for a few hours.
The bus was a direct service to the airport and was easy as. We checked in and nobody even looked twice at our slightly overweight carry-on backpacks.
We had an upgrade pending but they said it was unlikely as the flight was full. About 15 minutes before boarding I decided to ask about our upgrade, and it had come through! so that was a bonus.
It’s a 13 hour and 45 minute flight to Houston, but we left Auckland about an hour late, but still arrived on time, so the flight time was only 12 hours and 30 minutes.
We arrived in Houston, and as we were getting off the plane. there were at least 20 people lined up along the skywalk with wheelchairs. I thought this was odd as everyone had walked onto our flight in Auckland.
We arrived at terminal D, and had a 15 minute walk to terminal C for our next flight to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Our United flight was delayed due to storms in Nashville. Then we had to wait for flight attendants to arrive from another flight which was also delayed. Then they had to wait for wheel chair drivers (yes this is a thing). Apparently family members are not allowed to wheel their family onto the plane and wheel chair drivers were in short supply, which made me wonder why there were so many waiting outside our plane when we arrived.
Our United flight finally took off, and we landed at Grand Rapids at 1am. Our hotel shuttle stopped running at midnight, but thankfully there were a couple of taxi’s lined up. It cost us $28 USD to get a taxi 4.5 miles to our hotel.
Tomorrow we pick up our campervan!