Groundhog's Day

You know in that movie with Bill Murray (thanks for the help on that one Angie!) where he gets to re-live Groundhog's Day over and over and over...? Well today (if it is still Tuesday) was mine and Rick's own Groundhog's Day but rather than hearing a band and eating at a ridiculous restaurant, we were engulfed in airport stress, underwear unchanged for about 36 hours, people packed on a plane like sardines with some of the smells attached and an inability to get far enough away from your partner who is snoring so loudly next to you that the noise envades your earphones in such a way you contemplate the durability of free airplane pillows and whether they could truly work at suffocating a person in his sleep.

Seriously though, we left Riverside Lodge on Tuesday afternoon at 1:30 pm. We traveled to the airport where we had a 3 hour wait for our plane. In New Zealand, we did not pass through security like we do here. On a domestic flight, they don't even check your ID. We flew to the North Island of New Zealand where we changed terminals and waited for another 3 hours for our flight (are you seeing a pattern yet?). We then boarded our plane, which flew for about 12 hours, and we arrived in Los Angeles around 1:30 pm, also on Tuesday. We didn't have a flight until 7:15 pm and actually arrived at our house bags in hand at 11:15 pm on Tuesday night.

Really, other than the whole wearing the same underwear for the entire time, it wasn't really that bad. I am ready to board a 24 hour flight to Africa!