Greetings from sunny... Toombul??

Okay, so things didn't start off exactly according to plan. I honestly couldn't tell you how many days we've been on the road, what with changing time zones and everything, but I'm in Banff tonight and this is the first chance I've had to get to a decent internet terminal where I don't have to spend two dollars for ten minutes of trying to get a webpage to load. So there's a lot to tell.

Let's go back to last Friday morning, bright and early at the airport, where we learned that due to fog in Auckland our Air New Zealand flight was delayed for 7 (and eventually 8 hours). So we spent a delightful afternoon at Toombul shopping centre, not wanting to go too far in case the flight arrived early and we had to get back to the airport in a hurry. It was truly bizarre, I hadn't actually been to Toombul in ages, and because we'd gone there form the airport it did seem like we were in some strange foreign country.

So after many hours wandering aimlessly and a very ordinary airport meal purchased with our compensatory $12 meal vouchers, we finally flew out at about 9:30 that night, and arrived in Auckland at about 3am local time. Needless to say we had missed our connections on to LA and Vancouver so we were told we'd have to wait in Auckland 24 hours for the next flight. The airline did arrange for us to be put up in a hotel for the night but as we had to check out that morning by the time we got there we had about 4 hours sleep max. Spent the day wandering around Auckland so it wasn't a total disaster - I probably would have liked to have gone there eventually anyway. Went up the Skycity tower, and that was about it really. Auckland's nice enough but there's not much to do in just a few hours, when you can't really go far, so I can at least cross it off my list of places to see.

Went back to the airport that night, plane was late... again, but not by much, so after all this the 11 hour flight actually wasn't that bad as we were pretty damn tired and extremely sick of hanging around airports.

So LA airport, what a delightful experience that was. We were all completely exhausted by this time and although we got to leave the plane early to make our connection, and so finally thought something was going right.. our baggage was the last onto the carousel so our headstart was completely wasted. Then we had the security checkpoints which involved a security guy who was a dead ringer for Sipowicz from NYPD Blue warning me he was going to touch my torso and not to be alarmed. The whole 4 of us got patted down and checked, and had shoes and belts removed, and I found out afterwards my bag had been randomly checked too so we were finally given the all clear and could at last proceed on to Vancouver! Where we got to the hotel at about 11 at night, wandered outside to get some dinner and found our hotel, which was quite nice inside, was actually situated in a neighbourhood we affectionately came to refer to as the ghetto, due to the proliferation of adult stores and sex shops offering 25c peep shows (which sounds like a bit of a bargain really), people wandering around trying to sell pot and dodgy board games and boots out of cardboard boxes on every street corner.

Vancouver actually turned out to be a really nice city despite out initial impresssions - it seems it's only the two blocks or so outside our hotel were the only dodgy ones. They have a really nice harbour with a massive park, so we wandered around the there, went to the aquarium and saw the beluga whales, went up to Grouse Mountain and the Capilano suspension bridge and wandered from one end of the city to the other several times.



Missed out on going to Seattle because of the delays, which was really disappointing, but flew from Vancouver to Calgary this morning and drove straight out to Banff, which is a fantastic town, completely ringed by mountains and probably my new Favourite Town in the World (although I'm still very fond of Queenstown).



So it's off to Lake Louise tomorrow to take another few hundred photos of the stunnning mountains and lakes.

Back to the hotel now, which should be fun, as I was so keen to get out of there and see the sights this morning I only have a very vague idea which room I'm actually in. I'm think it's somehwere on Level 3. Only one way to find out I suppose...