On The Ground

We arrived in Wellington just after 9am on Thursday, local time, having skipped over Wednesday altogether.  The the long process of getting here was relatively uneventful: the usual stretches of sitting-around-and-waiting punctuated by shorter stretches of standing-around-and-waiting for this bit of airline protocol or that bit of security protocol.  But, all things considered, uneventful is good.  Tedium often gets the job done.

A few highlights:

• I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time on Tuesday afternoon, as we decended into LA.  I was not in a window seat, so I had to crane my neck to look out someone else's window to see a little corner of water like bronze in the light of sunset.
• Later, in the middle of the night, I waked to the back of the plane, just to stretch my legs, and took the time to look through the windows in the rear doors.  Looking north, I could see only clouds over a dark ocean, with a single point of light in all that immensity.  Looking south, I could see the light of the half moon reflected in the water and in the clouds.
• Our descent into Wellington, at the end of a 1-hour hop from Auckland, was the most exciting part of any of our three flights.  There was, as there often is, a strong wind blowing across the south end of the North Island, and the plane was buffeted this way and that is as we came in low over the water, seeming to reach land just in time for a landing smoother than we had any right to expect.

The wind has persisted all day, though it has just recently become more ferocious.  I'm looking out the window of our room in Weir House at Victoria University Wellington, up the hill toward the upper end of the Wellington Cable Car track.  Dark clouds are scudding across the sky, with silver-white clouds above.  From time to time, a gust of wind howls around the building and whistles through the windows.

I realize now how much I miss wind, when we're in the doldrums of Atlanta.  How often, living there, do we get to use any form of the verb "to scud"?

There's more to come, later. I'll help Dorothea upload some pictures she took from the plane as we flew from Atlanta to LA, and I'll upload a few pictures of the girls at play in the Newer-Than-New World.