Patience is a virtue (Guest post by Edward)

It seems that patience it a virtue when travelling in the USA, especially around Christmas time. We thought we had hit a home run when we 'scored' flights out of San Francisco to New York via Bakersfield and LA due to arrive at 5:49am two day after we were due to fly. Since getting that fine news, we have struck a couple of hurdles.

Firstly, was the issue of accomodation in New York. Despite the numerous attempts by us to contact the hostel to ask them to hold our reservation (we had had it booked for two months), it seems they saw fit to cancel the entire week. This left us with the problem of booking accomodation on New Years week the night before arrival (not an easy task). After about 45 minutes of extreme stress, we managed to get a place in Brookyln.







While the weather in New York stopped us getting in for a couple of days, now the weather in San Francisco has stopped us from getting out. It has been raining horizontally at the airport and so our flight to Bakersfield is delayed such that we could not make our connection in LA. We are now at a cold train station waiting to get back to a hotel (we have been to the airport three times now). Looking on the bright side, we will get another day in lovely San Francisco. Hopefully some kind of natural disaster will not hold us back again.


It has been utter chaos at the airport. The dummy spits and cranky passengers that we have seen have been highly amusing. We had to wait a couple of hours to get our bags back (they were soaked) but have managed to keep our spirits high. Petra organised some delicious snacks to get us by, although the peanut butter was conficated when we went through security so the bread was rather dry. Never mind, it's not what you do, it's the journey, right?

Let's see what tomorrow brings.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (while sitting on the floor at the baggage carousel at San Francisco Airport).

Good-bye New Zealand, Hello "San Francisco"

We left Dunedin last Thursday the 23rd of December, bound for Brisbane. It was very mixed feelings for us as we drove out of Dunedin (on a bus) to Christchurch. However, with lots of upcoming excitement, we haven't looked back.



We spent a few days in Brisbane for
Christmas. There was lots of great food and of course we managed to see all the family. We even shared our Christmas lunch (amazingly cooked by Chris and Greg) with a kookaburra and his friends!


We left on Boxing Day, headed for New York city. It was a very long flight but we got off for our San Francisco stop over very excited to see the sights for a day before flying to NY. However, we have stayed in San Francisco for a little longer than planned. A blizzard has hit New York and so no flights have made it into the city! Not to be beaten by this news, we are making the most of San Francisco and enjoying the warmer weather here.

After accidently sleeping for 13 hours we were woken in our hostel by the cleaner asking us to leave! We quickly found out we couldn't get to NY so have had a short day of sight seeing.









After much deliberation and time spent searching for internet cafes we made a big purchase. Can you guess what Petra is smiling about in this picture? it is very convienient and has a blogging app!