Flight to New Zealand

Our flight wasn't until 3:00pm, but we were going to take the public bus to the airport and since it was an international flight we would need to be there early, so we planned to leave the hostel at 11:00am. We ate breakfast, packed up and said our goodbyes to Matilda. We had run out of Brazilian money so we had to make an ATM run in order to pay for the bus. The guy at the hostel had told us to wait on the street nearest the beach but didn't give us any indication of when we could expect the bus to arrive, so we weren't sure how long we may be there for. We waited for a while and then asked some people just to make sure we were in the right place. I was really beginning to worry about the time and considered taking a cab but finally the bus came. It was over an hour drive to the international airport which was longer than we had anticipated but we made it just after 1:00pm which was still good timing. We waited in line for the LAN check in but when we gave the lady our ticket confirmation number, she said there was an issue with our tickets and sent us over to customer service. The customer service agent worked on our tickets for about 20 minutes, never communicating to us what was wrong. I was of course freaking out that we didn't have seats on the flight but finally she said everything was fine and printed our boarding passes. After we got through security, we had just enough time to buy a quick sandwich before boarding the plane. We flew to Santiago, Chile first which was about a four hour flight. The flight was fine and they played a few movies that were bad but kept me entertained.
Once we landed, we had a six hour layover so we found a coffee shop with internet and camped out to figure out our plan for New Zealand. We really got a lot done and by the time we boarded our flight, we had mapped out exactly where we wanted to go and how we were going to get there.
The flight to New Zealand was 14 hours and we were seated in the middle four person row. Alyssa got the aisle but I was between her and a very sweet old lady. I don't think the lady had ever been on a plane before as she clutched her purse and jacket the entire flight, including as she slept and couldn't figure out how to recline her seat. I helped her figure things out as best as I could but she spoke Portugese and no English. The flight wasn't too bad except that my audio system for my tv was broken so I couldn't hear anything that was being said in the movies I watched and ended up reading the Spanish subtitles. I was able to get a little bit of sleep and when we landed in New Zealand at 4:00am, I was actually pretty rested and ready to go.

Posted with Blogsy