North America Summer Tour 2022: A New Tour
Welcome back to yet another season of Breakfast and Travel Updates.
We are just beginning a six week tour of American and Canada where we will be looking to experience the crème de la crème of music venues, interstate highways, passenger vans, 3 star hotels, and of course breakfasts.
The tour kicked off yesterday with a flight from Auckland to Los Angeles and then a connecting flight up the coast to Seattle.
The band coffers are looking decidedly unhealthy at the moment after putting a fair amount of our savings into purchasing favourable horoscopes for the next two months. It was departure day and cruising along George Bolt Memorial Drive on the way to Auckland International Airport we were understandably frustrated to see this investment evaporate before our eyes as we spotted this terrible omen displayed on the side of the Mainfreight air-cargo headquarters.
The added pressure was perceptible as we mustered in the terminal but we kept a collective cool head and a positive situation was maintained throughout check-in.
Our flight was delayed by a half hour but eventually we boarded an Air New Zealand Boeing 777-300 for the twelve hour journey to LAX. Tristan and I were seated together and settled into the marathon motion-picture that is The Batman (2022). It proved to be a very soothing watch and we dozed our way through to the credits. We followed it up with the 2016 disaster film Deepwater Horizon which was a complete change of pace, packed to the brim with disregarded safety precautions, shuddering pressure gauges, and powerful oil metaphors. The glowing pixelated words from the Mainfreight sign burned in the back of our brains as we watched the flaming oil rig slip below the fiery waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The somewhat indirect flight path to LAX. This can happen when inflight use of cellular devices cause the plane’s GPS to experience minor malfunctions.
After catching a few hours of sleep I awoke to the breakfast service and enjoyed pancakes served with vanilla syrup and stewed fruit. This was accompanied by a pottle of fresh’n’fruity strawberry yoghurt and a small bowl of unripe pome chunks.
Our flight ended with a gentle approach that took us over the Channel Islands and Long Beach and the pilots coaxed the aircraft onto the runway around 3pm local time. We had a 4pm connection to make so we walked through the terminal with a unusual briskness on our way to border control. There the queue turned out to be quite substantial and the situation was on the brink of becoming a bad one; something we really had hoped to avoid. Jonathan pulled a hero moment though and talked his way to the front of the queue allowing him to pick up our bags, get the carnet signed at customs, and get everything checked in for the next flight, all single-handedly.
Meanwhile the rest of us crawled our way through the queue and then hurried over to Terminal 6 catch our connection .
Tristan jogs to rejoin the tour party after an emergency pee stop.
For a reason that we never discerned our flight ended up being delayed by three hours. There were plenty of great Terminal 6 facilities to enjoy so the time flew by and we were almost sad to board the Air Alaska 737-800 for the final leg of the journey.
The gorgeous approach into Seattle-Tacoma International.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is known locally as an expansive airport with live music and features an average google review of 4.1 stars taken from 19,995 reviews. It is also one of the 2,600 locations in the world that is home to smartecarte®, the leading provider of self-serve vended luggage carts, electronic lockers, commercial strollers and massage chairs. We were trying very hard not to waste any more of our already depleted tour budget on these overpriced luggage trolleys and I am pleased to announce that after a short amount of snooping around the pickup area our tally of unpaid smartecartes® on this tour went up to 2.
Our day ended on a pleasant note after discovering that there was an evening of shark content being screened on Discovery as part of the countdown to shark week. This was a good omen and we drifted off to sleep while William Shatner scuba dived amongst these beautiful and deadly predators.
