Made it to San Diego!

PHOTO: U.S.A.??? Nope, Trevor V. Stevens garage. A good warm up act for the U.S.A.

Sooooo tired, this may be short. Very bumpy flight to Auckland, then the terribly young, female pilot showed she definitely still had her training wheels on with a jaw-jarring landing. Our friend Trevor V. Stevens took us back to his place where Miss Heleee had cooked up a storm for us, and we did our best in a practice run to eat like Americans. Then back to Auckland, quick walk through and on to the plane, and off we soared. We had two seats right at the back of the plane - the plane was quite sparsely populated and they announced that when the seatbelt sign went off, you could move to other seats. The sign went off, and Mum leaped out an claimed a row of four seats faster than Lightning Bolt came out the blocks at the Olympics! What a Godsend those four seats were, although my turn was somewhat defeated by the two Poms who insisted in disussing their boring lives very loudly and very longly from 4.30 in the morning.

The U.S. Customs service commendably demonstrated how to take as long as possible to complete simple tasks; hence we did not clear customs until an hour and a half after we landed. Then a shuttle to Alamo where we ummed and ahhed over what car to choose (you get your pick - women should not have to make this decision), finally settling on a blue one.

We didn't opt for GPS (for what they charge we could have bought one) as I had already downloaded the driving instructions from Google. Unfortunately, Shirley gets carsick reading, and I was not quite that comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road, so we made the foolish presumption that San Diego SeaWorld or San Diego Zoo would be sufficiently sign posted. When we saw a sign that said Mexico 15 miles, we figured we had gone too far. A series of very friendly, but increasingly geographically challenged Americans, helped us cover the 20 minutes we'd gone wrong by in a staggering two hours! Bless them. I was shattered by the time we arrived, and were checked in at the hotel by Brian Pagan (yes, really), who has a personality to rival Spock, but WAS just brimming with information.

Shirley is already asleep, and I'm about to crash. Love to all, and hope life is good where you are.

More photos from getting to the USA.