Day 20 — Friday 19 Jan

We got up and started to pack our stuff up. We stopped off at foodtown and got some breakfast before heading into town. We dropped the car off at Omega having driven 2997km during our trip.

We took a walk down Queen street and continued until we got to the Auckland domain. It was very hot and was a longer walk than we remembered.

We went into the Auckland war memorial museum and started off by having lunch at the cafe. The museum has adopted a similar scheme to the Victoria and Albert museum in London in that there is a suggested amount of money to donate, with a lady at a till issuing tickets and taking your "donation". We then wandered around the various collections — maori, pacific, colonial Auckland, nature, and we also took a look at the war memorial. The cenotaf is based on the London one but they couldn't afford to buy the blueprints and so an artist went to the movies for a week and sketched it from the news reel!

We left the museum and found a different route back downtown from the domain. We again wandered along Queen street and did some CD and book shopping. We then went to Cayne's office and met some of Cayne's colleagues before getting the bus back to Cayne's flat.

We finished our packing, got changed and Cayne drove us to the airport. We checked in and then tried to redeem our "Holiday Rewards" points at the Regency duty free shop. This turned out to be a bit of a mess as they made a mistake with the redemption so we got a $20 voucher instead of $60, their mistake but they wouldn't believe me. I called the Holiday Rewards number and the chap I spoke to was really helpful and took my contact details.

We paid our departure tax of $22 each, filled in our departure card and headed through to departures where we bought a few presents for work — kiwi droppings and sheep droppings (some form of chocolate). We had a slice of pizza and a glass of L&P each (something Jono — a kiwi we know in London — had told us that we had to try) and then boarded the plane. For some reason we were sat in the middle 2 of 4 seats, this seemed like a really odd arrangement to us.

I finished reading my book, ate dinner — this wasn't as good as the food coming out — and then managed to get around 5 hours of sleep before waking up yesterday — we'd crossed over the International date line.

I watched "Toy Story 2" whilst eating breakfast which was okay.

We arrived at Los Angeles at around 1pm LA time which is around 10am NZ time and 9pm UK time! I attempted to set my watch to UK time but the winder broke :-(. We queued to get our boarding card and then crashed in the transit lounge listening to "I love Lucy" being played on one of the televisions.

We got back onto the plane and set off on the second leg of the journey. The service was a little better on this leg, as was the food. We watched "Bedazzled" — which was rubbish!

Day 21 — Saturday 20 Jan

We were served breakfast a couple of hours before arriving at Heathrow. We arrived slightly early, disembarked, collected our luggage and met up with our mini cab which took us back to Ealing.

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