In my lifetime, I have done a lot of traveling. My parents are big fans of world exploration, so we ventured out to different international destinations nearly every year. However, once college and financial independence (aka cheapness) hit, I stopped traveling much. This is why, despite having traveled a lot in my life, this trip to New Zealand was the first big international trip I had gone on without my parents taking care of the travel logistics. Couple my lack of experience with the fact that this was John’s first trip overseas ever (and the fact that we don’t like to plan ahead), and I bet you aren’t surprised to hear that it didn’t exactly go smoothly.
We arrived at the Austin airport with plenty of extra time, which proved to be a good thing because they couldn’t issue us our tickets. Our flight schedule consisted of a 10 hour layover in Sydney, which we figured would give us a fun opportunity to see Australia. However, we hadn’t realized that in order to visit Australia, we needed a traveler’s visa (which you cannot get after arrival). Even if we promised to stay in the airport in Sydney, we still couldn’t take our trip because a visa is required if want to leave the airport at all or if you are there for more than 8 hours.
The woman at the ticket counter spent about 45 minutes on and off the phone having increasingly grim sounding conversations of which she told us nothing. Feeling helpless and having no idea what the status was made me quite stressed (as I’m sure John can attest to).
In the end, we couldn’t figure out how to get a traveler’s visa on such short notice. Fortunately, though, our scheduled first flight ended up getting so delayed that we would have missed our flight from LA to Sydney. As a result, the ticket agent was able to book us on an entirely different schedule that got us into New Zealand about 8 hours earlier and didn’t run into the problems with an extended layover in Australia.
We were relieved, but still clueless, as she only provided us with the tickets for our first flight (something to do with it being through different carriers), and little information about each leg of our journey. As a result, when we landed in Sydney over an hour behind schedule, we had no idea if we were going to miss our flight to New Zealand.
To save time, I hurried through security and went to get the tickets for out flight to Christchurch. Through a miscommunication, I ended up at the ticketing counter just after security while John ended up at the ticketing counter at our gate. Unfortunately, these two spots were about a mile away from each other and we had no method of communication.
On top of that, I learned that New Zealand will not issue boarding tickets without printed out proof of your return flight. After struggling for at least 15 minutes to find a way to prove that we had already scheduled it with non-existent internet access, the ticketing agent finally gave in and looked up our flight info (I don’t know why he couldn’t just do that in the first place, but oh well).
At this point, our flight was due to leave in about 30 minutes and John was nowhere to be found. Thinking he might be at the gate, I hurried there… but no such luck (I later found out he was there but was perfectly hidden by a column). Anyhow this resulted in a frantic search where I ran back to the security and – while completely out of breath – started asking around. I even asked security if they had detained anyone, imagining him getting into an argument over the theracane he brought onboard (which, if you know John at all, you would realize is not all that unlikely of a possibility).
Needless to say, I eventually ran into him on my 3rd trip across the airport. I was relieved and exhausted (and sweaty… my apologies to the people who had to sit by me on the plane). It made me realize how much I use my cell phone as a crutch. We almost never make concrete plans at home, because we like to play things by ear and can always just call one another. However, this doesn’t work so well with hard deadlines (like flight times) and international travel where you can’t use your phone to communicate.
Fortunately, we made the flight and got into Christchurch… only to find out that our luggage had been lost. From there, we picked up our rental car, only to have the battery die the next morning. However, I consider this good fortune since we got a replacement before heading out of Christchurch. It would have been a lot worse if the battery had died while out in the middle of nowhere.
Once our bags arrived a day and a half later, we were on the road. I suppose we got all the rough patches out of the way, because the rest of the trip was smooth sailing.
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