Journey's End and Life Off the Ice

I'm home, and it kind of feels like I never left. That's the part that freaks me out most, is that none of it seems all that bizarre. Okay, well some of it does but for the most part everything is fairly as I left it. I left Auckland on Monday afternoon, I was so eager to get the hell out of New Zealand I think I left for the airport a good 4 and a half hours before my flight. I had been killing time all day, Adam left to meet up with his parent's that morning and I had mostly just been wandering Auckland for 5 hours...which was actually kind of fun, except for the heat, but then I just kept fixating on going to the airport and how I couldn't wait to be there so I figured I would just go and hang out there. Besides there were plenty of things to take care of, like the departure tax, checking my backpack, and catching up on TSA regulations...I realized a little too late that I had been out of society for too long and had forgotten that airports are that insane about what you can take on a plane so I ended up having to throw out my toothpaste and lotion because they were over the 3 oz or 100 ml limit for liquids and gels. I ended up running into at least 3 ice people on my flight, it was nice because they were all people I was glad I had run into and I got to catch up on their travels and plans for next season. The 13 hour flight wasn't so bad, Qantas rules and with on-demand-movies what more could you want?...Oh yeah, more than 4 hours sleep. But as I have said in previous posts, I have plenty of time for sleep in the oncoming weeks. The only really irritating travel started when I hit good old American soil. I knew I was stateside when I had to take off my shoes and belt to get on a plane. Up this point my travels had gone fairly smoothly; yes they were a bit boring, and yes sometimes the hostel we were staying in was a bio hazard, but... at this point my travels had been considerably trouble free. They had been able to find my reservations at every hostel I was at, I had always been able to find my hostel, my passport and other important items had made it through the whole trip with me, and my train/plane/taxi had always been amazingly uncomplicated. Then I hit the U.S. When we get into LAX and they can't get the sky-bridge thingy to work so we are waiting on the plane for a good 15 minutes as my mere 2 hour lay-over before my connecting flight begins to shrink. They finally get it to work (sort of, there was a gap between the plane and the walkway but it worked) and I go through the fun happy time that is customs (though I must admit it is way nicer when you are a citizen of the country you're in) and head for baggage claim. For some reason they thought that the luggage from a big Qantas international flight would fit on an itsy bitsy luggage carousel, so of course as the luggage all comes down it gets jammed up within minutes, so they keep having to unjam the carousel and get it going again over and over and my bag is one of the last ones off the plane so it ends up taking an hour to get my bag. So I have less than an hour to get to my other flight, in a domestic terminal elsewhere in LAX, and they usher me and this other girl from the Ice (Stephanie) into the re-check your bags and they look at my itinerary and even ask me when my flight is and put all kinds of tags on my bag and then they do the same with Stephanie's and just as they are about to haul our bags away the lady looks at Stephanie's itinerary again (She was on the same flight to Seattle) and was like "Oh no you leave in less than an hour, we can't recheck your bags here, you need to run for it!" and takes the time to pull all the tags off our bags and we haul ass for the other terminal. When we get there (out of breath and sweating from the LA heat) we both end up having complications getting our boarding passes, I'm not going to get into why because it's boring, but suffice it to say by the time I actually got to check my bag they were running me to the front of the line. So we make our flight, ready for home sweet home, and the flight even arrived in Seattle early....unfortunately my bag didn't make the plane at all. So I go through the info of how they get it to me and of course they promise I will have it in my hands that night...cut to that night they say it will be here by midnight...cut to the next morning when I still don't have my bag and they say it will be here by this afternoon. Argh! Well at least they know where it is, some people aren't so lucky (Ah Katie Leum, your story will never stop being inspirational)...still, I want my stuff! At least I'm home. It's a weird feeling to sleep in a real bed and use a real kitchen and be in a place so quiet...I realized in the past 7 months I have either lived in very close quarters with a a lot of people or been in a bustling Kiwi city. Suddenly I don't here firefighters drunkenly singing "I've Got Friends in Low Places", or my neighbors' lame girl talk, doors constantly opening and closing, or Adam and Jesse's TV, my roommates getting ready for work, people climbing through the ceiling, traffic, the comings and goings of an Auckland club, or the chirping of whatever the obnoxious New Zealand equivalent to a cricket is...in other words, the silence is deafening. The lack of schedule is pretty jarring too, to go from working 60 hours a week to having nothing but free time isn't really working for me. Here I thought I would catch up on movies, music. painting, reading, tv, and news and surprisingly I don't care about any of it. But it is nice to see people and my cat and have the option to catch up on all these things if I should choose to do so. And I guess that's that...this is a travel blog, not so much for my everyday life so thanks to everybody who has been keeping up with my travels and taken an interest in what I have been doing with my life and all that. Hopefully I will be back in McMurdo in August and I will resume my musings about life on the ice...but for now this is the end of this chapter....