Ruby Slippers

I'm home.

Well, home, minus my checked bag. But more of that later.

Here are some of the photos from Rororua. Although I love Brandon (my camera) dearly, the pictures don't quite do some of the colors justice.

This is Mt. Ruapehu (at least I think it is), the north island's tallest mountain. Our bus driver on the way to Rotorua stopped so we could get some pictures. I'm glad he did; it's hard to get pictures like this through the dirty window of a moving bus.

All in all, I'm glad to be home. It's nice to not be moving every few days, and to have properly washed clothes, and to be able to flick the turn signal up on a car to indicate I'm turning right instead of left (although it's strange to sit on the driver's side as the passenger).

I think, though, in a few days, I'm going to start missing it. Three and a half weeks is more than enough time to fall in love with a place, and I most thoroughly have.

The flight home was uneventful...that is, until we got to LAX. They couldn't seem to get the hold open to get out our checked bags. So, after waiting for two hours, they let us go through customs without them, assuring us that they'd "take care of things." No one seemed to know anything, so I headed over to the Verizon counter to check in for my LAX-->SeaTac flight.

An interesting bit of information: Verizon and Quantas have no security agreement. Therefore, I absolutely had to have my bag if I didn't want it to stay in LA once they managed to get it off.

I headed back to international arrivals to get my bag that still wasn't off the plane to stand in a line that wrapped halfway back to customs. Mind you, this is after 20+ hours with no sleep whatsoever, twelve of those hours on a plane, three of them in Auckland's airport, and two of them in LAX waiting for my bag--and I still have to catch a connecting flight.

Thanks to a very kind security officer who started helping the end of the line, I was able to get my paperwork filled out. He promised another counter would book me on a different flight so I could have my bag. After a miscommunication at that counter, I was told to return to the line I'd just left, because the one I was at didn't deal in bags at all. The woman must have seen that I was about to start crying (or yelling--it probably looked like I could do either), she checked with the baggage counter. Thankfully, the form I filled out means Quantas will deliver my checked bag to my doorstep when they actually get it off the plane (along with the bags of all 356 other passengers on that particular 747), so I no longer needed to worry about it.

Needless to say, I felt much like dancing on my way back to the Verizon counter--although I could also have just fallen asleep.

A few housekeeping things:

1. A more complete collection of photos is up here. It is by no means the complete album; I took well over 2,000 pictures. Some of the files are corrupted (at least, I think that's why they're not appearing). I'll get to it...eventually. My apologies if you can't get to them. Kali (one of the girls on the trip) is working on a webpage that will have lots and lots of photos that all of us took. I'll post the link when it's up.

2. I'll be putting up my essays when I finish them. They're due tomorrow at midnight....and that's what I should be doing right now. Emphasis on should.

3. Just because I'm home doesn't mean I'm going to abandon this blog. I'll be in Turkey for all of next school year--there'll be something over there that's worth talking about, I'm sure.

m.

One more thing:

We should have planned our dates a bit differently. This is what we missed, by two days, in Wellington. Click for a larger version to read the actor's names.

(Yes, that is Waiting for Godot with Ian Makellen that we missed by three days.)