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My flight to San Francisco (12 Aug 2007)

Hello.

Finally I am going to write to you about my trip. I was going to just backdate the articles but that’s just going to get confusing as you won’t know whether something I have written now is new or not.

I left New Zealand on 12 August 2007. That’s a long time ago. Family and friends (you know who you are) fared me well (I think you can say that) at Wellington Airport, and I was suitably sad on the plane, but when I got to Auckland, who was there but my uncle and cousin (who also know who you are). I have decided to protect people’s anonymity, you see.

Now, as you may remember, air travel during that time was a bit strange. Two days before I left, British police has just foiled the plot to bring down planes flying from London to the United States. Liquids and gels were banned from hand luggage on some flights. On some flights you were only allowed to take a plastic bag with your passport and glasses if you needed them (without their case). Luckily I wasn’t subjected to that because it would have been a very long, boring flight. Not that I actually used my computer at all during the flight but it’s nice to have the option.

I flew on one of Air New Zealand‘s new Boeing 777s. It’s a very spacious plane. It was cool. There was even enough legroom in economy class. I asked at checkin if they could put me in the emergency row and they said they’d try, but it didn’t happen. Here’s something I wrote on my Pocket PC while I was in flight:

So, about 5 minutes after they turned on the entertainment system, my one told me that the movie I wanted wasn’t available. Then it rebooted with a Windows CE bootup screen. It looks like it reimages the device every boot. took a really time too!

The Coke is singaporean.

That is all…

Air New Zealand has a personal inflight entertainment system, based on Windows CE. Mauricio Freitas had commented that he had managed to crash the system a few weeks before I travelled and sure enough I did the same!

There were some good movies on the plane but I can’t remember which ones. I did remember that I saved some of the movies for my flight to London, as the same movies would be shown then.

I landed in San Francisco and was greeted by my Cousin. Who shall remain anonymous like all the other characters in my story. Incidentally, I arrived a few hours before I left Wellington!

I will write about my time in Northern California later, but if you want to see some photos check out this photoset on Flickr. If you sign up to Flickr and add me as a contact, I will be able to mark you as friend or family and you’ll be able to see some more photos (of people). Otherwise you’re just stuck with things.