Day 01 — Sunday 31 Dec

A cab from Ealing Executive Cars arrived, as ordered, at 11am. It got us to Heathrow Terminal 3 in plenty of time and we joined the queue to check in. We got checked in, and got seats together — the first seats we were allocated weren't. Next stop was to pick up our currency from Thomas Cook, we'd pre-booked this through the BAA which means no commission!

We went through into departures and did the usual shopping for films, video cassettes and batteries before having lunch at "Chez Gerard" which was very pleasant.

We boarded the plane and set off on the first (and shortest) leg at around 3pm — there was a slight delay due to the wintery conditions in London. The leg room on board flight NZ1 was pretty generous (for pacific class — that's economy on most other airlines), and the meal was decent, with real crockery and a real wine glass rather than plastic stuff. I didn't get much sleep, and so watched a couple of films and other programmes. We were presented with afternoon tea shortly before celebrating the British New Year. We landed at Los Angeles about an hour and a half later where it was around 5:30pm, still on the 31st!

We disembarked and were herded into the transit lounge, where there were some drinks, a very, very small shop, no more than a stall really, and queues for the toilets. We had to queue up again to get passes to allow us to board again and then got back on to the plane for the second leg.

The second leg was better for me than the first as I got a bit more sleep, and didn't even attempt to watch any of the films. I set my watch to Auckland time, ate some dinner and alternated between reading my book and having a doze.

Day 02 — Monday 1 Jan

This was basically the day we lost due to crossing the international date line, I never worked out quite how much of the day we did see, but it can't have been more than a couple of hours.

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