Tuesday 25th November 2025

Tuesday 25^th November

SHE SAID:

We were up at 4.30am & at the airport queuing to drop the bags by 5am.

It was a very long, boring day of travelling. Air New Zealand were good again, BUT, of course, S***star Airlines stuffed up our seats; we were in separate seats & rows, then their “brilliant” baggage handlers didn’t know how to load the cargo in the plane so had to do it all again, which took an hour & 15 minutes.

We had to wait for a taxi at Busselton Airport there were none waiting. You can imagine how tired & cranky I was when we finally got in after a 22-hour day!

The quaint Mangonui fishing village,
close to Molly's house

Farewelling NZ yesterday morning

HE SAID:

There was a little clock-watching before our 4:30 alarm, but we managed to be up, ready and gone quickly. Dropping off the rental car at Auckland Airport was a bit of a pain due to us missing the subtle signage and having to do an extra loop around the carparks, but we were still done and dusted promptly. After that there was the usual queuing at every step, but the flight was on-time and there were no problems.

Jetstar, on the other hand, were their usual poor standard. I shouldn’t be surprised, yet when I have to fly with them I always am. Disappointing.

As we were barely awake when we got back to the van we tried to arrange to meet Dorte and Gary tomorrow morning, after we'd had some sleep. But as they couldn't meet up until tomorrow afternoon, and we were due in Dryandra at that time, a couple of hundred kilometres away, we popped in for about 2 minutes, said hello, collected our mail, and went back to the van to veg.