Kiwi Quest 2010 - T-minus 5 days!

The groundhogs collectively predicted 6 more weeks of winter today. Bah, forget that! I'm heading to summer.

What is this thing they call "excited"? I haven't reached that point yet. January was a busy month for me and my mind is still too preoccupied with getting ready to leave to be excited. As is also my pattern, I usually don't let myself really get excited until I'm en route to wherever it is that I'm headed. Superstition maybe? More likely that I'm too worried about forgetting something key, and too busy repetitiously checking all my vital stuff, that stress is all I tend to know until I'm in the air/on the rails/out at sea when it's too late to do anything if something has indeed been forgotten.

Have I told you lately how exceedingly annoying Aeroplan (and Air Canada by association) is to deal with? Near the end of January, I was sure my flights were good to go and I had even blogged to that effect. Then, one Monday morning, I got an unasked-for revised itinerary from Aeroplan in my email.... perfect for a Monday. Upon reading it, I discovered that my 12-hour layover in San Francisco on the way home had been clipped to about 2.5 hours. At first, I was really mad because I had plans in place to make the best of that long layover - meeting up with a long-lost friend and getting in some exploration of a city on my "Go There" list. But, after I moaned about it a few times to a few sympathetic listeners, I realized that there were some positives to the new itinerary:


1) I will now be arriving back in Toronto on the same calendar day that I leave New Zealand. This means I'll be in 4 countries (and countless time zones) in one day which is pretty cool to say I've done. It also means I won't be so completely destroyed the next day because I won't be arriving in the wee hours of the morning after flying overnight.

2) I have a good reason to make a trip to San Francisco in the future in order to spend more than a few hours there. Road trip!!!

3) I didn't get charged $94.50 for this itinerary change because Aeroplan took it upon themselves to do it for me. Ha!

So, with 5 days to go, I've a heap of clothes and gear piled in the middle of my now-semi-tidy living room with the backpack into which it is all supposed to go being buried somewhere at the bottom. I think I've bought anything I was missing and my to-do list is shrinking although my packing list keeps growing. I'm even sewing buttons back on my shorts if you can believe it. I didn't feel like pinning them shut for 3 weeks. My apartment even nearly no longer looks like the site of some kind of explosion...