The Great Escape

With the wife, son and baby sitter (my mum) in tow, we set off on the great escape from my home town, travelling over 11,000Km in 24 hours. Nothing could stop us from getting to the final destination: too much luggage, missing tags, lost luggage, a lost passport, and a lack of a map.

Getting to US soil was the least of our problems, despite the 13 hour journey from New Zealand. Air New Zealand squeezed our mildly overweight suitcases into our alloted weight allowance, US Immigration didn't hassle us over the visas, and agriculture just smiled as they took our fruit away from us. It was too good to be true. However, we first spotted trouble when the SFO staff pointed out that a piece of luggage was missing its tag. Fine, we'll just check it in and we did. But that lingering doubt about the other bags came back to haunt us.

When we arrived at Seattle-Tacoma airport, we were missing one bag. Another bag had been retagged unbeknownst to us, and we had taken out the stroller that Air New Zealand insisted we cargo from NZ. So we had four luggage tags that we could not account for and one bag missing. This seemed all too much for the United people to comprehend, and to date the bag has yet to be even found. Fortunately, nothing particularly valuable nor critical was in the suitcase. Just a 6 month supply of Xander's baby formula. It is going to cost a fortune to replace it here in the US because it is like 4 times the price, sheesh!

During all this, I somehow managed to lose Xander's passport during the chaos around the security checkpoint on our way out of San Francisco. Fortunately, this was the last time we needed it. But I have to file a police report for the lost passport, and the advice I got from the local police department was to call 911!!!

We picked up the rental car from the airport, a big new American car, a Chevy Impala. It was good it was so large, with 8 pieces of luggage, a baby seat, a stroller, hand luggage and three adults it got a little cozy in there. I am sure Pearl can testify to that since she was jammed in the back between all the luggage.

The night we arrived in Seattle, there was thick fog everywhere. I was surprised we were allowed to land. That kind of fog would have shut Wellington airport for over a week. Finding our way to the temporary housing was realtively easy despite this. The hardest thing was finding the actual apartment in the housing complex. Trying to find building I in a relatively dark weirdly laid out place was impossible. I am sure they did this to test us. So we used the car park number and assumed that it would be close by. Fortunately this was the case. The next challenge was to work out how to open the lock box that I had conveniently forgot to print the instructions out for. In complete darkness too. After finding a torch, I discovered that there was a torch attached to the lock box, but I couldn't see it in the dark :P

All in all, we got here pretty unscathed. Minus a few bits, but pretty much in one piece.

View photos from the trip here and here