DAY 123
Week 18
CORINTH (Texas, USA) to AUCKLAND (Auckland, NZ)
Saturday October 21st, 2006
TODAYS MILEAGE – 7793 miles or 12542 kilometres
TRIP MILEAGE – 24237 miles or 39006 kilometres
Time to hit the frog & toad again!!! 
Some of my American mates have asked "how do you measure a kilometre" and having traveled 12540 of them today, I can unequivocally state the following – a meter has been officially defined to be the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
So you're wondering just what is involved in both time and distance in getting to Auckland (NZ). My days usually start around 5AM and go on from there. A bit of last minute packing and some stuff arsing around, that always comes with jetting off overseas for 7 weeks, and we were on the road headed to DFW International Airport and checking in around 5:30PM.
Over the years I have become sick & tired of the cabin crew attitudes of United Airlines (or Untied Airlines as I call them) on trans-Pacific flights. That same attitude seems to have permeated to the ground staff now. I just seems that you are interfering with "their time" when asking if there was an exit row seat. Sure they're all available she says – for $39.00. Whatever, they can go empty for all I care!!! Whatever happened to do a little bit extra for your customers when you can???
So now I go with Air New Zealand and thoroughly enjoy doing so. Flight NZ9097 to Los Angeles (California) LAX Airport took just on 3¼ hours to cover the 1234 miles (1985 kilometres).
An hour and half layover in L.A. was just enough to get from the domestic terminal, jump on the A bus and head over to Terminal 2. Flight NZ5 to Auckland (NZ) airport took nearly 13 hours to cross 6523 miles (10498 kilometres) of nothing but ocean and arrive at 7:45AM the morning of Monday, October 23rd.
Yay, I'm in New Zealand.
Here's a breakdown of the travel times and distances in getting over there:
∗ CORINTH (Texas, USA) to DALLAS ~ DFW International Airport (Texas, USA)
23 miles or 37 kilometres
• Travel Time: 30 minutes
∗ DFW International Airport (Texas, USA) to LOS ANGELES ~ LAX International Airport (California, USA)
1234 miles or 1985 kilometres
• Flight Time: 2 hours 50 minutes
6523 miles or 10498 kilometres
• Flight Time: 12 hours 51 minutes
∗ AUCKLAND ~ International Airport (Auckland, NZ) to AUCKLAND ~ Rydges Auckland (Auckland, NZ)
13 miles or 21 kilometres
• Travel Time: 29 minutes