The Alex & The Eleanor + 1

Sun. Dec. 23 2007
Lv LAX arr. Auckland
Our flight was not till 8:45pm, so we had lots of time to kill. We meet up with Erik and Angel for burgers at Fathers Office – a cool place with an amazing selection of beer. The beer was good, the fries were very good and the company was great, but the burger? Gimme a shack burger any day. I would be happy to explore the rest of the menu though. We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around Santa Monica, it’s a lovely day – sunny and warm and I relish watching all the poor suckers running around doing last minute shopping. We get to the airport the prescribed 2 hours early and the line is out the door, literally – it turns out Air NZ has 3 flights a day – 8pm, 8:45pm  and 9:30pm. Arghhhh. But wait, that short line, that isn’t just for Business,  its for premier ecomony as well! Well well well, this bodes very well. We board and find we have bulkhead seats, always nice. The seats are not huge, and do not recline much, but the are certainly bigger and better then the way back of the plane, and once we take off, dinner is not bad. Not great, but ok, and true to the rumors of being the drinking mans airline, I manage to get some champagne with dinner. I watch a movie and decide to try and sleep. Alex was sweet enough to let me have the window seat, so I carefully arrange my pillows and blankets and try to conk out. I don’t feel like I get any sleep at all, tossing and turning and glaring at the people behind us who are playing cards and shuffling the cards soooo loudly, but I finally check the time and we land in 3 hours. Huh. Guess I slept after all. We have breakfast and watch another movie and boom. We have arrived.

Mon. Dec 24 2007
Wait,  no Christmas Eve for us. But how will Santa find us?