May 2002
26 Sunday
We made it.  We didn't fall out of the sky.  We weren't hijacked.   We didn't suffer DVT.  Sally and I landed at San Francisco airport without major incident at about 2:15pm on Sunday having flown Qantas non stop from Auckland.  Novey and Russell were waiting for us and after greetings all round we got a chauferred ride along the freeway to their apartment in Mountain View. A wee bit weird to realise that we left our place at Massey in Auckland at 2:30pm Sunday and arrived in San Francisco before we left!  Or something like that. The flight AK to LAX was interesting though tiring. Neither Sally nor I slept properly on the plane, but just kept dozing on and off trying to adjust to the constant drone of the plane.  International flights really cram passenger seats together compared with NZ national flights and as a result it becomes difficult to get into comfortable positions for sleeping. We experienced a bit of a stressful time finding terminal #3 at LAX for our flight to San Francisco and ended up asking for directions from 3 different people, but we eventually made the right departure lounge in plenty of time. The drive from the airport to Russell's place took about 25 minutes along freeway 101 (which we came to know very well during our stay) and when we got to his apartment at Rock St in Mountain View, we just collapsed into their comfortable lounge furniture and wanted to go to sleep.

Looking along Rock St from outside Russell and Novey's apartment

However we were persuaded by Novey and Russell that the best thing for jet lag would be to simply keep going through the afternoon and go to bed at normal Californian time so, as food supplies had to be purchased, we all went off to the local supermarket (Safeways) to buy food and then to a vegetarian takeaways to get what turned out to be a very nice meal for dinner.