I'm Clive, Fly Me

I love Air New Zealand. 'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back.' That's got to put you in a good mood hasn't it?

Esther at Flight Centre hadn't put my frquent flyer number in the booking system so I started scheduled for seat 60D which is somewhere aft of the tailfin on a 777. The lovely Wellington check-in girl with amazing Sideshow Bob hair couldn't access another seat so when I got to the lounge in Auckland they found seat 30D which was row one of cattle class; much better than trying to sit in the slipstream.

We boarded and I settled mnyself in. Then the Chief Steward came over and said,

'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back. Could you come and chat please?'
'Are you going to throw me off?'
'No, no. We have a lady we need to move, would you mind moving forward to seat 4D?'
'Not at all, that would be very nice.'

So off I went into ultra-super-dooper class with those diagon-ally facing fully reclining bed things. Added to that another stewardess came and said,

'Welcome back Mr. Rushton. We'd like to give you a bottle of wine as a present. Do you prepare pinot or saugnon blanc?'

'Pinot please.'

No one else got a wine present so i have no idea why I did but, hey, Gibbston Valley Pinot Noir 2006 is great and retails around the $45 mark.

The flight was good and, very unusual for me, I slept! Fourteen hours of flying over water later, coming into Canadian airspace the Captain came over the intercom and said,

'There's been a further dump of snow in the Vancouver area and they're trying to clear the runway so we can land. We have to go into a holding pattern for some time.'

No problem until a little later when he announced,

'Due to the fuel situation we have about four minutes to get the all clear to land otherwise we will have to divert to San Fransisco.'

That's about two and a half hours due south and past around a dozen airports which can take a 777 so a huge collective groan from everyone on board. Anyway we got the all clear and down we went. All the markings on the runways were snowed out so we took forever to get near the terminal. Then the airbridge was frozen so it couldn't be manouvered onto the plane. Now Air New Zealand are terrific but Air Canada and Vancouver ground crews are pretty useless. If we'd been in Montreal the snow and ice would have been a mere trifle of a problem but the high-tech solution here was two slow guys with one shovel. They took 75 minutes to get it moving and off we went.

Then the bags took an hour and, insert a conspiracy theory here, the very last bags to come off were ALL for the first class cabin.

Merry Christmas :)