Heather and Chris’s Great Adventure began on Monday 4 June with just two minor blips – Heather got onto the plane and found she had left her backpack at security and so had to beat south through the incoming crowds back to the grinning security guy who reminded her that she had said a few minutes earlier, “I’m travelling light (ha ha),”  but he didn’t think she meant THAT light.  Meanwhile, back on the plane Chris was sitting in the wrong row of seats. Oh well, it could have been worse, knowing us.

Tai chi…

…the right way

Met a lawyer that I have known over the years Council Briefing, Jock Nicolson and his wife, going to see their new grandchild in the UK. My father was a client of his back in the day, something that I always find interesting. Jock said to me once, “I acted for him, I can see him sitting in front of me now.”

Beautiful Billy seen the night before we left,
with Dylan and Orla.

After a bracing walk from Auckland domestic to international, follow the green line they said and which Heather did striding ahead – but in the wrong direction - we boarded the Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore on the first leg of the journey. It wasn’t too bad actually. The staff were super attentive and the vegetarian food we had ordered was nice. It was the first time that we had come up against the modern trend of everyone constantly walking round the plane fighting deep vein thrombosis; it led to severe logjams, usually in the galley/toilet areas.  Heather of course made friends with dozens of people, (28 women biking in Italy and Croatia organised by Pukekohe Travel – riding by day and on a boat by night; an Indian couple from Calcutta who have a daughter in Auckland and a son in Wellington plus three grandchildren here (the son and daughter want them live here but they are not sure); a Swiss couple from Hastings with three kids who came to work here for two years but found they like it and now are taking a new child home to show their parents, a Kiwi girl married to an English guy with a big eleven-month-old baby, the guy homesick for UK; a woman opposite us who had to manually move her legs and her nice husband who helped her; and, as we were close to the front of economy, in ahead of us were several families with babies to ogle and gurgle over, despite having met the superlative Billy with Orla and Dylan on the night before we left Wellington.

A good coffee at last – from an
Australian cafe in Singapore!