Off, well almost

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just received advice from our engineers that your aircraft is undergoing routine maintenance and there will be a delay in departing. Air New Zealand regrets this inconvenience"

If Air New Zealand were worried about inconveniencing passengers then you would have thought that they would schedule "routine maintenance" at such a time that it didn't impact on passengers - it's called Customer Service 101!

Not long after the murmur quitened down in the departure lounge after the announcement however we were advised that boarding would commence and in fact NZ24 (even numbers outbound, odd numbers inbound) pushed back from gate 5 and we departed around 30 minutes after the scheduled time on Air New Zealand's current longest sector to Vancouver - a flight time of 13hrs 15mins.

On the flight were the Black Sox en route to Saskatoon for the world champs later in the month and I am sure some of the bigger boys in the team enjoyed the "generous" legroom that economy class provided.

Within an hour of leaving Auckland and before dinner had been served we flew for around 30 minutes in rather boisterous turbulence so much so that dinner service was suspended and the flight was a bumpy one for a good part of the first few hours of the trip.

Managed to get some shuteye through the night but can't say that it was a refreshing sleep.

Air New Zealand is not as I remember it - the average age of the cabin crew was closer to 60 than 30 and there are obvious signs of cost cutting e.g. there was no offer of a hot towel to refresh before breakfast.

On arriving at Vancouver we rang Sadiq Toma, the owner of the apartment where we are staying in Yaletown to let him know that we had landed and were on our way downtown via SkyTrain.

Within an hour and a half from landing we were standing outside the apartment in a very chic part of town and within 2 blocks of the main shopping strip in Vancouver, however the apartment was still being serviced so we left our bags on site and found a Starbucks.

After coffee we strolled down (or was it up) Robson St to locate a supermarket to obtain some essentials. For those of our vintage you would be familiar with the chain IGA which predominated in NZ in the 60s & 70s but which like the Moa is now extinct, but not here in Canada.

We have left winter behind as Vancouver was 23 degrees today and therefore once we got back to the apartment complex a swim in the pool was very refreshing - we are not so naive to believe that the UK later in the week will be as warm, but we hope.

As a point of interest NZ is currently hosting the FIFA Men's Under 20s World Cup and Vancouver the Women's Under 20s World Cup - perhaps Sepp will turn up here rather than down there!

It is 7.45pm now and the sun is still belting down but bed is beckoning so I'm off.

 

 

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