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I’ve Been Away And It Was Not Fun
No, it wasn’t prison!
I am originally from New Zealand, the land of the Kiwi or Aotearoa as the indigenous Maori peoples call it. Aotearoa translated is “The Land Of The Long White Cloud.”
My trip was to visit NZ on family matters. My older sister had gone through some serious surgery with complications and was not getting any younger so I thought it best to travel now rather than later.
The visit was just fine. The plane travel and the airports were not!
It has been seven years since I was last on a plane, the year before the planet encompassing COVID virus struck and created much havoc on people's lives, country economies, and the tourist industry in particular.
Plane travel has not improved since then. The first challenge was finding an affordable airfare. The flying time from Vancouver to Auckland, New Zealand is around 14 hours on a direct flight. Flying with a stopover through hubs such as Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Hawaii or Fiji adds an extra three to six hours or more to the travel time.
I found an affordable airfare online with Fiji Airways that included a three hour stop in Nandi, Fiji on the way to New Zealand and a six hour wait on the way back to Vancouver. While the getting-off and getting back-on was a pain, the low cost of the…
