A Damp December Day

Rain has been on and off for a couple of days but today, 1st December, it decided it was definitely on.
We are warm and dry in our large tent in the garden. Talk about glamping!

Because it was so wet, the family decided to spend the morning at the Hamilton Museum - particularly the kids science section, Bright Sparks.

We played tunes on the pipes of different lengths, played 3D noughts and crosses game, interacted with the farm display where one could pull knitted vegetables out of the "ground" and load them into a wheelbarrow, got to operate grain machines and more.

The kids could dress up as cows and learn about the digestion of a cow.

My favourite was a ferro-fluid controlled by two adjustable magnets.

I also enjoyed the machine which could draw, controlled by pendulum-type movements of horizontal and vertical weights.

We whiled away the rainy morning and came back for a yummy lunch.

The longest day

We left on Tuesday. At two pm we squashed our luggage into our daughter’s car and left for the Gautrain bus station at Damelin. I still had a Gautrain card from my PE trip and we had bought another one from the Caltex garage the day before. Lo and behold, I did not have enough funds in mine. (I had twelve rand and I thought that was enough but the bus fare seems to have gone up to eighteen rand.) However, the driver was very accommodating and we did get driven to the Sandton Gautrain station. The handle of Brian’s bag ripped off in the loading process.

Because we had booked on line, the bag drop was quick and painless and we had plenty of time to waste so we had cappuccino and a giant muffin at Mugg and Bean while I watched the loading of food onto a Kenyan Airways plane.

First the catering truck manoeuvred close to the plane

Then it was raised by an enormous hydraulic system and repositioned right up against the door. 

Then the waste and trash from the previous flight was moved out of the plane into the truck and finally the new food unit was wheeled into the plane.

The flight was cramped and sleepless. We left at eight and landed in Sydney at 6.30am which was 15.30 Australian time. We had enough time for cappuccinos at McDonalds (after I had treated myself to a shower.) The ordering process was high tech and I cancelled my order four times before I got it right on their touch screens and their delivery system was technologically advanced (or was it? Remember the pneumatic tube delivery system some businesses used to use for receipts in the sixties and seventies?)

It was raining in Sydney. In fact, according to the news, it was the heaviest rain they had had in three years, causing flooding. Only one run way was still operational, which delayed our take-off and caused a lot of trepidation as we took off into the leaden, glowering clouds. The turbulence was the worst we’d ever had and left us feeling distinctly queasy. The flight attendant gave us ginger ale (to settle the stomach) and it seemed to help.

We were almost an hour behind schedule in Auckland. The customs and passport processes were much easier than we had feared, especially as we were taking goods for other people in our bags. We landed at close to one am on Thursday morning, New Zealand time. The  plan was to collect the rented car we had booked at five, but when we phoned the shuttle service half an hour before, they had no knowledge of our booking. We are now waiting until business hours at eight to phone them and sort out the problem. (Hopefully)  We still have another twelve or fourteen hours left of the day which makes it         a  v e r y   l o n g  day.