Unfortunately I have to endure this day twice, as you do when you fly east across the date line from New Zealand or Australia to Los Angeles. I say endure because I have 27 hours of flying to get from Auckland to Lima, Peru as well as 12 hours of waiting around in airports, and all 39 hours take place on the same day because of the date change.

I was originally supposed to fly Qantas from Auckland -> Los Angeles, and American Airlines from Los Angeles -> Lima, but because Qantas are useless they re-routed my first flight via Sydney, and because of the volcanic ash back in April my second flight with AA was re-routed via Miami, so now my flight goes Auckland -> Sydney -> Los Angeles -> Miami -> Lima.

Auckland -> Sydney (3 hours) was great because each person had about 6 seats to themselves, although it left at 6:15am which meant I had to leave my Mum’s house at 3:00am so that I had time to return my rental car and get to the airport.

Sydney -> LA (13 hours) I don’t know how I got any sleep at all because I’d foolishly selected a seat near where they put all the screaming infants. Also the movies / tv on demand broke about 2 hours into the flight and they couldn’t get it going again, which made the flight tough going – that’s going to give Qantas 2 points less out of 10 when it comes time for me to do my online evaluation of them! In LA I had 8 hours until my next flight so I found a quiet part of the airport where there weren’t too many people around and I lay back on the chairs and drifted in and out of sleep while clutching all the time at my bag so nobody took it.

LA -> Miami (5 hours) I’m writing this blog entry right now during the Los Angeles -> Miami flight. Out of all the flights I’ve taken in the last two months, this is the first one that’s been late, and of course this is the only flight where I have a tight connection. In Miami I have 70 minutes to make my connecting flight to Lima and we took off from Los Angeles exactly 69 minutes late, therefore by my calculations I have exactly 60 seconds to catch my flight to Lima. Needless to say it’s not looking good. Plus in the seat directly in front of me there is a screaming child, and it’s the type of screaming that’s so intense that she’s choking on her own spit or something because she’s screaming so hard. When she’s not screaming, she’s poking feet, hands, seatbelts, toys, and anything else she can get her hands on through the back of her seat and they’re all poking my legs.

Miami -> Lima (5.5 hours) Since the majority of this flight is actually tomorrow I’ll tell you how this goes tomorrow if it doesn’t leave without me, which it almost certainly will.