Air NZ Premium Economy: review

Ok, so we arrive at Heathrow at 10.15am tomorrow and hit the ground (perhaps not my best choice of phrase in the circs) running so I need to sleep. Time to break out the half-tab of Zopiclone (I'm such a lightweight druggie) but before that: review of Air NZ's brand-new 777-300 Premium Economy class.

Looks good: angled pods, cream leather seats, USB ports and other techno-features, big feather pillows, bean bags for the feet, business class food (though minus the cocktails) - all good, even excellent. (Mmm, juicy curried prawns and green rice.)

But in preventing the dreaded personal space-invasion caused by the traditional reclining seat, the design means that in-pod reclining is severely limited - just a few centimetres, which feels like almost nothing. So spending an entire night in this cabin is a bit of a trial, with lots of shifting about and hip-relieving. It's disappointing.

The only thing that makes me feel better about the extra expense (or airpoints) involved here is looking back down into the economy cabin, where everyone's jammed in with their elbows tucked into their sides, looking distinctly strait-laced and Victorian. If that's the alternative (ignoring here the impossible expense of personally-paid-for Business, with its - spit - LIE-FLAT beds) then Premium Economy is the only way to go. But don't expect to be wafted off to the Land of Nod without pharmacological assistance. Or alcohol. Probably both.

Mind you, as compensation for the recline fail, there's the size of the loo, which in airplane terms is enormous, with space for oooh, whatever you might fancy. There's even a wall mocked-up as a bookshelf, complete with fictitious titles. Or possibly inspirational? Because one of them is 'The Mile-High Club.

Welcome to the USA. No, really.

So now I have to eat my words. Here I am in transit at LAX and it's not hateful at all. We've got nearly two hours of kicking our heels in what is pretty much a sensory deprivation tank (although with free WiFi, coffee and snacks so really not very deprived at all) - but everyone has been friendly and relaxed.
There was that usual "Let's photograph and fingerprint everyone in the world! Twice! Or as often as we can!" project going on of course, but we were able to take our own time about going to get it done. And though Rodriguez was thrown by a previous Press visa, that caused great anxiety at the border last time on the way to Seattle, I didn't get growled at this time. Which is always nice.
So it's sunny and warm and smoggy outside, and the girls were squeaking with excitement as we came in to land, but we're cut off from it all in this no-man's land until we set off again on the next leg to London. Yay!

No more sleeps

Now while some of us, in the run-up to our family expedition to the Other Hemisphere, have been flat-out toothbrushing mould out of the inner recesses of the shower cabinet, hacking a rotted tree stump out of the hen-run and terrifying the dog by taking her for a public bath and pedicure, others have had the leisure to be playing with the labelling machine.* You might have thought that see-through plastic containers obviated the need for labels, but clearly (ha) not.

There's rather more pre-trip pressure involved in engaging a house-sitter brought up by a fiercely finicky mother than I would have liked; but I'm hopeful that we'll come home to a house that's neater by far than when my own, markedly less fastidiously-raised, daughters have been left in charge.

The weather is being difficult: lots of rain here making the last-minute laundry a challenge; plus it's turned very cold, so it's hard to make the leap of imagination necessary when packing for destination temperatures that are currently ranging, equally unhelpfully, from 16 all the way up to 34.

And then there are niggling worries about unfinished stories here at home when we head off today: what's going to happen with Happy Feet the 3000-kilometre stray Emperor penguin, currently languishing in Wellington Zoo with a stomach full of sand? How many more shakes will Christchurch cop? Will they finally get to the Pike River bodies? Will my poor, dear, skinny old cat cark it while I'm gone? And will the OH be able to find his flight socks in his bag?

* Also, it must be said, booking, organising and paying for just about everything...

Fish on Friday

It's been raining all day today - so it was pretty much like the other weekend up in Northland where, as the lady at the Kaitaia Visitor Centre said, "We're all about beaches and fishing up here." We cast about vainly for inspiration amongst the racks of horse-riding, quad bike, sand-dune surfing and boat hire brochures. It was a hard to find things to do, once we'd been to Gumdiggers Park and looked at holes in the ground and had a coffee and mooched about in the villa at Carrington Resort gazing out at a golfcourse empty of everything but a pair of pukeko.

But the Matthews Vintage Collection was fun, in that appealing personal-passion way: 40 years of collecting and restoring old tractors, then cars, then farm machinery, then pretty much anything really. It was all very neatly displayed and labelled in a big shed, and the retired farming couple there were lovely. Lyn played the Pianola while we poked through the displays - moa bones, mobile phones, foreign coins, flour-bag knickers - and afterwards gave us a bag of chokos to take away (still in the fridge - must get around to googling what to do with them). And Winston showed us his latest project, a classic car just back from the spray shop: just a skeleton, months of happy tinkering ahead of him putting it all back together. So I suppose that's what you do in winter in Northland.

Plus eating - the Mangawai Fish Shop is World Famous in New Zealand, and rightly so for its position over the water in a lovely bay, and serves great fish beautifully battered. The seagulls are pretty disgusted about the 'Please do not feed the birds' signs though, and kept up a chorus of complaint down on the rocks beneath.

Counting down

Also, gearing up: for the big family expedition to England next week, where I will be the only one of us in the aliens queue at immigration, all the others smugly flashing their British passports.

There will be Paris, London, Harry Potter, 'Downton Abbey', Oxford college accommodation, old friends, older aunts, Ireland and Hong Kong. Air NZ will be wafting us there in Premium Economy (as long as Chile's volcano allows us to get off the ground) and returning us in Business. The only fly in the ointment is having to pass through LAX, where even posters everywhere encouraging passengers to expect friendly treatment from staff (and where to report it if not) aren't enough to compensate for the stupidly, unreasonably, inefficiently, massively inconveniently, cruelly stringent security measures that make being even (especially) a transit passenger there simply hateful. HATEFUL!

Heathrow isn't a bundle of laughs either, full of officious jobsworths glorying in their power to make innocent, tired, anxious passengers even more miserable; and it's dirty and crowded and uncomfortable and inefficient. But on past experience, the uniformed non-entities at LAX enforcing absurd levels of security on innocent see-aboves take the cake for delivering an unpleasant, tedious, wearying and worrying un-Welcome to the USA.

Not green about the white stuff

Though it's raining and dreary today, it's not cold: last month was the warmest May on record, and June is shaping up to be the same (yesterday it was over 21 degrees). And this is winter, people! The shortest day is on Wednesday, and there are still flowers on the hibiscus bushes and monarch butterflies floating about.

None of the skifields around the country are able to open yet, their beanied employees kicking their heels - or at least, in the case of Mt Hutt, lending a hand with shovelling silt in Christchurch. They're particularly worried down in Queenstown, because their big Winter Festival, beginning next week, is missing that one vital ingredient - though fortunately for the cold-freaks they've already arranged to bring in an ice-rink from America, to be erected on the Village Green. "It's a first for New Zealand!" the festival director said excitedly.

The festival is actually the biggest Winter Party in the southern hemisphere (how many contenders for that rather esoteric title, I wonder?) and certainly sounds pretty lively (if you discount the jazz element, yawn). For many people, Queenstown is a snow town, so it's odd that I've been there lots of times but only ever in the summer or autumn. Though the convention is for Kiwis to sniff at the town for being so touristy, it's still a beautiful, beautiful place, with heaps of things to do to suit all preferences. Even if it does look magnificent with snow everywhere, I think I will always prefer seeing the Remarkables bare, and the hills green, and the lupins in flower. Which they possibly still are, this year.

Downhearted

Sigh. While thousands of people in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch wait, understandably less and less patiently, to find out if their suburb is on the list for clearance as henceforth uninhabitable, the verdict has been pronounced on both of the city's cathedrals. After Monday's double shake, Christ Church Cathedral in the Square, and the Roman Catholic cathedral in Barbados Street are both going to have to be demolished completely. The fancy Baroque Catholic one is beyond saving, but there's still some hope that the neo-Gothic Anglican one will be able to be taken down, the stonework saved - although the pretty Rose Window is now in bits after Monday.

What happens then it's still far too soon to say: reconstructed, or a new design entirely, something modern or reflecting what was lost - that's a decision that no-one is able even to think about right now. There have been 6,800 after-shocks since the September quake, and 15 since February that have been 5-plus, with no end in sight, so for most people their focus has shortened to just getting through each day.

After I went to Frankfurt and Mainz last month, where I was delighted to find that many of the pretty medieval houses I admired there and elsewhere in Germany were actually reconstructions after they were destroyed in bombing during the war, I facilely thought that that could be the way for Christchurch to go: putting back up replicas of all the character buildings that everyone loved, and never mind highfaluting ideals like architectural honesty. But at least the war ended, full stop, in 1945 and the rebuilding could begin with confidence.

Canterbury's seismic activity is such an unknown, possibly continuing for no-one knows how long, that thinking about any sort of future for Christchurch is getting harder and harder.

And just to destroy entirely anyone's faith in the benevolence of Mother Nature, people trying to leave Christchurch by air have been trapped at the airport by ash from the volcano currently erupting in Chile. I think we've all got it by now, Earth: you're in charge.