It was an early start as i had been booked for a very full day today by those great people at Eagle Air. The aim was to clear the last three airports I have on my list, W(h)anganui, Gisborne and Kaitaia.
The itinery I had was pretty full on, WLG-AKL-WAG-AKL-GIS-AKL-KAT-AKL-WLG, a total of 8 sectors in 11hours!
The most challenging thing was the connection onto WAG. Only 5minutes according to my e-ticket!
I waited outside for my taxi at 6am and got a phone call which promptly made my phone go dead with no battery power left -damn. I think it was the taxi company phoning.....
Well 10minutes later still no taxi. So i had to go back to the house and phone to chase them up. turns out the guy left without me, despite me being on time?! A new taxi arrived just as I was about to give up and take the car or get another taxi...
The guy floored it and we made it to the airport as boarding had commenced - no time for the lounge and breakfast then! Also no time to talk with the ground staff to discuss my tight connection time.
We departed on time thankfully, and were off to the south with a turn over the cook strait and AKL bound.
We arrived on the stand just before 8am and I had mentioned to the aircrew on our decent about my tight connection. They couldn't get through to the ground crew as descent had commenced and didn't want to disturb the pilots. They radioed through on landing and I heard the radio when I reached the regional gates that are a fair run away from the jet gates....
I had missed it. Not sure by how many minutes, but i couldn't have been more than a couple or five....
I guess it was a long shot and a big ask to make a 5minute connection at AKL dom! so it was off to the Koru club for a breakfast and coffee. I still had the GIS flight at 10.45am so it gave me a couple of hours to write up a blog or two (see previous) and check emails etc.
Half an hour before the departure time, I was paged to the desk and asked if I wanted to voluntarily be bumped and take the next GIS flight....I explained my flight schedule and that as the KAT flight was the only one of the day, it was difficult to re-route around that and get home to WLG today. She told me that as I was on a staff travel booking, if they couldn't find anyone else, I would be moved.
Luckily no more pages and I left for the regional gates again and my boarding pass went through ok. Off to GIsborne ontime too.
Flight was under an hour and we had a 25min turnaround in GIS before heading back.
The terminal is pretty small, although has by the looks of it a pretty good cafe. More info here
and here.
GIS's claim to fame is that it is the only runway in the world that has a railway line running through it! I didn't actually notice during my visit, although I do remember hearing that there is an airport with a railway line running across the air strip...
Back to AKL and another visit to the Koru lounge for some lunch. Not much in the way of hot food, a curried soup I think. I ended up running for the Kaitaia flight due to a lack of lounge announcements until the final one calling me by name. I legged it to the other end of the terminal and got there just in time....(lucky this time!). I had mistakenly been looking at the boarding time of my return portion instead of the outbound and got it into my head that it was boarding at 10 past the hour and not the correct 5 to the hour...
25minutes and we were off again back to the city of sails.
Another stop at the Koru club and this time a beer and snack. The jet back to Welly was at 5pm so I had about 30mins to relax and reflect on if I could have feasibly caught that first flight. the only way would have been if they had held it for me. Oh well, I guess I will add WAG to MRO to complete another day....
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