Final post from USA trip

Notes from 12/1/12

Arrived home exhausted yesterday, after spending the day in Auckland with one of my daughters and her family.  (Not exhausted because of the daughter but because of the lengthy flight from San Francisco.)

One of Liz's friends, Keri (she'd come to NZ in October last year with Liz) took Jon Beck and us to a place called Barbacoa.  It’s a bit of an Arabian nights approach in décor, with chunks of art on the walls and strange seating arrangements, and dimly lit.  The food was superb, made even more enjoyable by the fact that Keri wanted to pay for the meal.  I had an Idaho trout (a half trout, I think, in fact) cooked on cedar wood – there were no bones (as specified in the menu) and the flesh just fell away and was wonderfully sweet.  It was served on a some kind of rice which the menu online doesn't identify: this had a bitter tang to it, and was a bit overpowering for the fish, we felt (Celia had a bite or two, of course).    Keri then took us on a bit of a tour around the North End of the city (Boise, in this case, which, by the way is from the French word for trees; hence the city’s name: City of Trees).  She showed us the student campus and the older houses that were being done up and the grass hill on which the house of a wealthy industrialist stands – supposedly the grass on this hill is mown once a week.  Crikey!

Afterwards Celia and I sorted out our bags and got ready for our departure the next morning.  Cindy dropped us off at the airport where we had to repack our suitcases when we went to book in.  Even though the combined total was under the proper weight, one was over and one was under.  In Dunedin they hadn’t worried about this; just put them through.  But the woman in Boise was insistent that it had to be done properly, so we fiddled around with the cases until it was.  These sorts of things really get me frazzled, as do the security places in the US airports where you have to take off shoes and belts and hold your handkerchieves above your head (as happened in LA) and generally make yourself look a prat.  The customs people in LA were very pleasant – indeed they have a charter on their booths telling us they will be pleasant – but the security people take their power rather too seriously I think.  The whole security thing is a farce anyway; it smacks of paranoia, and of course now that it’s in place can’t be got rid of without thousands of people losing their jobs.  In NZ, the security people are much more friendly – at Auckland last night we’d bought a milkshake and a long roll when we realised we probably needed to be on the other side of security.  We stuffed the rolls in one of our bags and I said to the woman, can we take these drinks through?  Yup, no problem.  They were the same at the customs side in Auckland – in LA they’d fussed about a couple of packets of seeds that they didn’t want us to take in; in Auckland we told them we had some lollies for the kids and such and they just put us through without worry.

San Francisco is a different airport altogether to LAX – as we’d been told it would be.  It has life and warmth and visual interest, and is generally much more friendly.  You have to wonder why LAX is so different. 

We got onto the plane for Auckland on time at 7 pm, but then sat for an hour while they dealt with someone who’d become sick and had to be taken off again – and until they found that person’s luggage amongst the hundreds of items.  In spite of that we got to NZ at the time we should have: 5 am.  We were booked in a three-seater; we’d asked if we could change to a two-seater but the women on the counter taking all the boarding passes from people who’d booked through a different airline (they were changing them to AirNZ boarding passes, which seemed like doubling handling) said the plane was full and they couldn’t do anything.  The plane wasn’t full, by any means, and there were spare seats scattered around – including beside us!  So we had three seats between the two of us, which was good.  

The trip from SF was very long.  It’s only an hour longer than the reverse version, but seemed interminable.  I read a lot more – even in the wee hours of the morning – but that didn’t help much.  I couldn’t get comfortable for long, whichever way I sat, so sleep was very intermittant.  I’d picked up a book from a shop in the airport – Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist – which had been on sale for under $5US.  It turned out to be a treat – a novel in which the narrator, a poet, discusses the need for rhyme, and a host of other things.  I’d never heard of the author, and might see what else he’s written.  This is his tenth novel, I think.   It may be that it suited my taste because of its subject matter, more than anything, but the writing is a delight, full of wonderful phrases, and lots of self-deprecating humour.  It was as well I had this book, as the Michael Connelly thrillers we’d bought for Kindle were all short stories, and Nathan Berma’s Bringing Heaven down to Earth proved to be rather thin.  I got through some of it, but wasn’t inspired.  I’d finished Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction a day or so before we left.

Anyway, finally into Auckland at 5 am, and after Customs and Security yet again we got out into the main area and disposed of our bags into AirNZ’s care once again.  Libby turned up around six, with Israel, and we headed out to her place.   Zonked.  It was great to be somewhere where you could put your head down if you felt like it, and I did for a while.  We spent the day out, going by train to Newmarket (which was as far as it was going while they did some repairs) getting the bus into Britomart, and then the ferry across to Devonport.  All for free on our Gold Cards. The day was beautiful, and we paddled in the water.  It started to rain on the way back but not enough to bother anyone, and then got very muggy once they rain stopped.  It was a bit of a relief to get to the airport!  And home my daughter Abby picked us up, with her son, Tom ...and with our dog, Marley, who was over the moon at seeing Celia again.  He sat on her lap the whole way, though he did manage to  give me a couple of minutes attention at one point.....

Day after the wedding

Notes from the 8th Jan - day after the wedding. 

Well, the wedding is over and done, and we’re all walking around like zombies.   We went into the church at ten (I’d thought that was when the wedding was starting and wondered why everyone was being so casual about the time) and hung around for an hour until the actual service at eleven.  This meant we greeted people as they came in.  The girls were running around in the background - they get dressed and doodied up at the church, here.   Sarah was visible occasionally, but not Liz, who managed to stay out of sight.    Cathy had made some wonderful 'buttonholes' (I'm not sure what the American word is) for everyone in the bridal party.  These were made out of various bird feathers, including pheasants feathers, and were held together at the bottom so that they formed a kind of miniature spray.   They looked great. 

We got the latest update of the order of things from the pastor, Harold, a lovely man keen to make sure everyone was at ease (I think he found Dom’s shenanaghins at the rehearsal a bit surprising), but Liz had already re-ordered things by that stage by email, and so we finally went with her version! Harold had thought there wasn’t an official run of things and had made one up in case.   Ben and Dan, as well as being part of the bridal party, worked as ushers.  This meant that Ben took Celia down the aisle with me following; a little odd, but what the heck.  Sarah came in by herself, as she was the only bridesmaid - although Daniel was also on Liz’s side up on the altar steps - he spent most of the service with his cap on (except when they were praying) and much of it checking out the congregation.  

The service went well - a fairly pregnant lady played the piano for the songs (we didn’t stand, which would have made them easier to sing) and I read Psalm 103 from the NASB.  Had quite a number of people afterwards asking if I was a Pastor/Preacher because I read it so well!   (I said, nope, just an actor, which bemused them a bit.)  Anyway I was glad it went over well - I was the only non-wedding party person to do anything. 

Both Dom and Liz choked up at points in the vows section - and then Dom didn’t realise, after he’d put the ring on Liz's finger that he was supposed to say an I will at that point (I will accept this woman, or something) so that caused a bit of a laugh all round. 

After the service the two families and Dom and Liz stood in a line and greeted everyone as they went out.  It took at least an hour, and we were all exhausted by the end.   Each person wanted to say something, or felt they should, and then we talked and so it went on.   The grandparents were included in this line, as well as Chris' step-mother, who retired early on.  It was exhausting keeping up with it. 

Home for a snooze or a rest and trying to remember what else was needing to be taken to the reception.   Seems we've spent the last couple of days transporting things hither and yon.   The reception was a bit different to a New Zealand one: for starters all the guests were already there when we arrived and the food ladies were well organised.  And people weren't dressed up, as they had been for the wedding.  Only those 'officially' involved (including the parents) were still in their wedding finery.  

There were supposed to be 200 guests, but there were probably more like150, perhaps less…which meant we had a bit of a crisis when we cleared up later on: there was heaps of food left over. We managed to give away some of the excess food and took the rest home where no doubt it'll get used up fairly quickly. 

Sarah made a speech about Liz, and that was fun, and Jon made one about Dom and explained ‘wench emancipation day’ - at Celia’s behest. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to speak, although Dom had asked me too - there wasn’t a master of ceremonies as such - but they called me up and I delivered my somewhat prepared speech; 'somewhat' in the sense that I’d made notes and went a bit beyond them.  I wanted to pray for them too, so I’d written the short prayer out, but got very choked up in the middle of it, as I had briefly while reading Psalm 103. And again all sorts of people congratulated me on the speech - it’s the American way, I think: they’re very encouraging.

There was a bit of uncertainty about whether we were supposed to clean up before we left, but people were starting to leave by 7.30 - 8.00 anyway, so we got on with it.  Chris said he’d never had to clean up after a wedding and I said, just make a start and people will help, and they did.  The chairs and tables were put away in no time, but the food sorting out took longer.  The volunteer ladies had cleaned up the kitchen well, and it was mostly a matter of figuring out how to sort the food.  We had enough hands on deck to do all the work.  In spite of exhaustion Cathy and her family came back to the house and stayed till some early morning hour; Christin and Rick, who were supposed to be leaving about 5.30 am the next day were apparently up till 2 or more; Celia stayed up till 1 am, playing games with the others, and another group were drinking and talking out in the workshop.    

So my baby is married; seems ridiculous, but there it is.  

Friday: the day before the wedding

Some notes from the 6th Jan. 

Another thing that's popular here in Idaho is homeschooling.  Liz and her siblings were homeschooled, and Cathy is still doing it with two of her boys. We met another woman at the wedding reception who homeschools all five of her children. 

Nampa - and Boise to an extent - are places where you need a car.  I don't know how you'd do shopping in Nampa without one.  I discovered later that there's an older part of town (near the reception hall, as it happens) that's more built-up, and where the shops are close to each other like Dunedin.  And Boise has a similar older area.  But in general everything is well spaced-out.  

Last minute things are being done all over the place - small things and big.  Chris is making a 'prop' to take photographs against (I thought it was for the couple, but it was actually for anyone who wanted).  It's a board with a couple of large rectangles cut out for people to stand behind, and a bunch of sepia photos in frames scattered around the rectangles.  It got a lot of use at the wedding reception.   We had been planning to go to the reception hall this afternoon to get things ready for the wedding tomorrow, but there was a funeral arranged at the last minute and the hall was being used.   Curiously, the wedding rehearsal was to have been today (Friday) originally; it had to be shifted to the Thursday because of another funeral!

Anyway, after a sandwich-type tea, put together by Margaret, a friend of Patty, (they're both friends of Cindy’s from way back, we went off to the reception hall for the big sort-out.   We were there for three hours almost, and got huge amounts ready for tomorrow, though there are still some decorating things to do - but they’ll be done by some others.  There were quite a lot of people - maybe twenty - so the work got well done.  Liz wasn’t there (she had gone to stay the night down the road with Sarah at a friend’s house) and neither was Dom, who hopefully got some rest before his big day.

The two sisters, Christin and Cathy got to grips with the thing, along with Cindy and Celia, and labelled stuff and organised and made it clear for the volunteer ladies coming in the next day as to what needed to be done.  Note all these names starting with C - there are more in Cindy's family.   And Chris and Carol (brother and sister) also start with C.  Thankfully, the children's names break the mould!

More from the 5th

More notes from the 5th Jan. 

Another sister has arrived with her family - Cathy and Dave, and their three boys.  This family is staying in a nearby motel (although nearby in Nampa terms can be several miles.) 

We’re supposed to be having a Thanksgiving Dinner (somewhat out of season) and there’ll be a host of people here, though the turkey was taking its time to cook through.  The best man has arrived with two of his brothers and the girlfriend of one of those brothers.   They've been in Houston, Texas for a family reunion, and have made this part of the USA stay.  Liz's brother and sister are here, and her grandparents.  There seems to be people everywhere.  

Most of the men had gone shooting this afternoon, including those who've never touched a gun in their lives. The ones who do know what they're doing gave the others careful instructions, and they were only shooting at targets anyway.   The only accident of any sort was when the gun the best man was holding recoiled onto his face and nearly gave him a black eye to sport at the wedding.  You can see this on You Tube, believe it or not: the video has the title, The Moneyshot. 

Meanwhile, Celia and I were taken into Boise by Sarah to pick up Chris’s sister, Carol, and she came with us while we went around the Capitol (see photo) and some of the streets nearby. (There was even the leftovers of an Occupy movement tent site in the park nearby - and squirrels frolicking.)   This was the first time we'd done any touring around, and it was nice to see a different side of the area: more built-up and not nearly so spread out.  

We met a woman from Glasgow in the Basque museum shop; she’s married to a bloke from Idaho who came over to Glasgow to ask her father for his daughter’s hand (!)  

Carol is from California (Newport Beach) and has a nice wit.  We were talking about Dom being a toy-boy at one point, because he’s six months younger than Liz (whose birthday is the day after the wedding!) and someone else said it was more the other way around. I can’t remember what word they used, but I suggested cougar.  Carol said she’d told someone who said she was a cougar she was more like a sabre-tooth tiger.  

Shopping and rehearsal

Notes from the 5th Jan. 

In the morning, we got onto dealing with the potatoes and coleslaw, and while we were doing that Christin and Rick arrived. They're staying in a caravan parked outside the garage.  Christin is Cindy’s younger sister (one of several) and they’d driven from California, taking some fourteen hours with a bit of a sleep at some point.  They’re a great pair: she’s lively and funny and full of beans.  Rick seems laconic at first, but like all the others he’s full of stories and humour, though he takes more time about the telling. Christin chipped in and helped with the coleslaw sorting-out the moment she arrived. 

In the afternoon we went to the shops again and the three blokes (Ben, Rick and I ) initially went into Wal-Mart with the women, but later on went for a drive around Nampa by ourselves.  It just seems to go on and on, and it would be pretty much impossible without a car.  There don’t seem to be any buses either, so I don’t know how people without cars get on.   We had kind of gone out to see what the place had in the way of ‘tourist’ attractions, but all there seems to be - and no doubt we’re wrong - is retail and more retail and bigger retail. 

Anyway, home for dinner.   Meals here lean towards Mexican-style food, with chilli beans and tacos and ground beef (something like the equivalent of mince) and things like Bell peppers (our capsicums) and Jalapeños (pronounced halapeños).  This last item is another pepper, but dangerously hot if you happen to get the right one in the batch.  I refrained. 

Everyone was up fairly sharply to get to the rehearsal at nine this morning.  It’s the first time the household has really been up early since we’ve been here.  Chris normally gets up at 5.30 am and goes to work early and gets home early after a ten hour day.  So he's finding these late starts a bit disorientating, I think.  

We're expecting upwards of 200 guests to the reception.   Hopefully there'll be enough food (us Crowls always like to have more than enough, just in case - it's one of our traits.)

I slept very badly last night - took ages to get to sleep, and then woke early.   Not enough exercise and too much strolling round shops - getting ‘shopping legs’ as Cindy called them in the process. Chris reckoned it’s a world wide phenomenon: women enjoying shopping; men not.  (I think more that we tend to go into a shop to get something, not just browse.  Although that does happen: in my case in a bookshop, in the case of other men in shops like Cabela's.)

Chris is a brilliant hobby furniture-maker, (his job is carpentry) but he also does a lot of other bloke things like diving and fishing and so on.  Anyway, he dives in the local river every year and collects all the stuff that people lose in the river, or throw away for some reason.   He’s got a collection of sunglasses, and has picked up all sorts of other things, including laptops!   Last night Ben fitted two memory cards that had gone into the river into the two laptops we’ve got here.  Both Dom and mine were struggling with memory (and ours with having far too much loading at start-up)   After a bit of jiggling, both of them worked, so both the computers are running a good deal better.   

We went to the wedding rehearsal this morning: for me it was a bit chaotic with the young people clowning around. The minister was very pleasant - a little fellow called Harold (I think) - and very patient.  Perhaps he’s used to young people these days being so all-over-the-place at the rehearsal.   Liz’s grandparents were there (Cindy’s father and his second wife).  It's their second marriage in each case, and they met at the Sacramento Opera where both of them sang in the chorus.  So we had something in common. 

I’m supposed to be reading a Psalm at the wedding service.  I hadn’t heard about it till this morning, and so checked up on the Psalm that I was supposed to read - Psalm 45 - and found that while it had some connections with the wedding ceremony, it also talked about the groom shooting his enemies with arrows.  Decided there might be a better Psalm to try and eventually we went for Psalm 130, a psalm I know well and enjoy reading.  

I thought I might have to play the piano at the service too, because the church organist wasn't available.  However, a friend is happy to do it, and so that relieves me of that duty. 

Third day in Nampa

Notes written on 3.1.12

Funny day today - woke about 8 and things didn’t get going much before 10.30.  By that time most of the others had gone for a run/walk, and then when Liz got back she realised they had to go to see the Pastor about a kind of pre-marriage talk.   So she and Dom rushed off together in the hired car.   Chris at some point went off to see his physio - he fell off a ladder a while ago and hurt his shoulder - and Celia, Ben, Cindy and I headed into Nampa to go to the thrift stores (op shops in NZ).   

I'm a bit confused as to where we’ve been today, as it’s been a ‘shopping’ day to a certain extent: we went to Cashco at some point, and that must have been in Nampa because Dan was there working (he's the fiancée's younger brother).   It’s massive, and of course, it sells stuff in bulk, so everything seems bigger and bigger.   Then we had lunch, and I’m not sure now if that was in Nampa or Boise - think the latter.   This was at a place rather like Great Taste in Dunedin, but with a much wider range of Chinese food, and little or no European food.   It was buffet, with an eat as much as you want approach.   The food was good, but of course with those sorts of places you need to watch that you don’t each as much as you want, or you make yourself sick.   Anyway, afterwards we went over to the bank across the park to try and get some cash out.  I’d tried to use my HSBC debit card in Cashco but it wouldn’t go.  The bank was very friendly, but couldn’t take the driver’s license as identification because it doesn’t fit into their system, and they weren’t sure where else we could try - though the manager did offer a couple of other suggestions.  I was concerned that maybe my pin number wasn’t the usual one.  Anyway, we could have gone to another bank tomorrow with our passports, as the bank manager suggested, but instead we decided to try the ATM in the same bank…and both of us got money out on our credit cards without problem.   Ridiculous: machines trust us more than people. 

After the bank episode, Chris and Cindy both managed to lock themselves out of the car - Chris then tried the old clothes hanger thru the window thing, and that wasn’t working and then this burly young family came along and said he’d 'done this hundreds of times,' (which could have been ominous!) and after trying the clothes hanger without success and then something else and then something else he finally managed to get the car open.  Great rejoicing.  Dom and Liz, meanwhile, had been running around getting the marriage licence, something that had required them to go back and forward and hither and yon. 

Anyway, while the women went to some shop for something to do with the wedding, the men went into Barnes and Noble.  This was an experience in the sense that it shows that books are definitely not on their way out yet.  Huge, of course, like everything else (including the two thrift shops), and packed with interesting stuff….none of which I bought.  Finally after we’d gone into some other time-wasting shop for no particular reason, the blokes escaped to Cabela's, a real man’s shop with guns and fishing equipment and real fish in an aquarium (trout and catfish) and stuffed animals in a big scenic thing in the middle of the shop and hunting gear and clothes and shoes and everything else.  This was more interesting certainly than the previous place, but I was getting bushed, and finally, after the women arrived I went and sat in one of the cars and nodded off. Celia went back in the shop and said later it would have been her choice for a place to really look around in. 

Lastly, Ben drove Cindy, Celia and me home in the hired car.  He was okay, except he found the fact that the stop signs weren’t highlighted on the road itself with markings rather disconcerting, and at one point he nearly went sailing through one, with all three of us shouting Stop!!   It's nervewracking driving on the right because your brain insists the traffic is coming towards you on the same side of the road, and when you turn at an intersection you seem to be heading towards the wrong side of things.  The stop signs are everywhere - they're aren't any Give Way signs (although there's the occasional 'Yield') and there's this funny rule about turning right when you're on the extreme right of two or three lanes even though the lights are red and the right turn arrow is also red!  

2nd day in Boise

Notes written on the 2nd Jan relating to that day. 

I didn’t wake till 9.am Boise time, which was great, because it meant I actually slept very well in spite of the changes of time.  The house didn’t rouse up much until later, in fact, but my older son, Ben (who'd arrived the day before) and Celia and I spent our first ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the water to come out of the shower instead of the bath in the bathroom nearest to our bedroom.  Our hostess, Cindy, arrived and saved the day: there’s a little round disk that needs to be pushed up - that’s all it is; very simple.   

After breakfast - or maybe even before it (with all the guests mealtimes were a bit erratic around here) Chris  (my future daughter-in-law's dad) showed Celia and me his workshop. Massive. Not only the main workshop but a toilet room, an office, a paint shop, and a cupboard in which there are two big pipes for sucking the dust and chips out of the main workshop.  Everything is neat and there are places for everything: he’s in the middle of doing a walnut entertainment cabinet for someone, and has done a host of other similar projects over the years.  He has stacks of spare wood and machines and tools - you name it.  The ’tour’ took nearly an hour by the time Celia has asked about this and that.   And he was pleased to tell her.  They enjoy talking, these Idaho people - everywhere we go they’re happy to talk and tell you stories, and find out more about you.  It’s great, really, and very friendly. 

Cindy, Celia and I went and visited the place where the reception is going to be held.  The colouring of houses and countryside is rather muted perhaps because all the grass is browned off and the trees are bare.   I think it’s the lack of greenery that surprises me, but of course we've come from high summer.  Everyone here has been expecting snow, but there's no sign of it, and the ski fields are getting desperate. 

Celia and Cindy had a big sort out as to what we’d be doing for the meal (pretty much a buffet) for the wedding and have got it in hand.  They went shopping this afternoon and bought in all the supplies.  At the same time Liz (fiancée), Dom (son getting married), Ben and a friend of Liz’s called Heather who’d been at the house organising something else to do with the wedding - and me - all went into Boise, met up with Liz's sister, Sarah, and dropped her car off to her, and coincidentally met her father-in-law. Sarah and her husband Joel have an apartment above where Joel’s dad works, and also above the restaurant Sarah used to work.  Joel has guns, and a massive collection of Lego - which impressed Celia.  Guns are popular in Idaho, as we were to find out. 

Then we went onto the airport and hired a car - Ben seems comfortable with driving and thinks that having an extra car would be good, but on this trip Liz drove back because we had some navigating to do.  

In the end it had got dark by the time we dealt with hiring the car - the guy behind the counter was very friendly and chatty, as was the girl in the next booth, who came in to help - and so we headed onto the tuxedo place where the fittings needed to be sorted out for Dom and Ben.  One of the girl assistants turned out to be from Russia even though she seemed to speak American English with no accent at all.   Curiously she didn’t seem to know about Siberia being used as a prison area - don’t ask me how we got onto that…!

Travelling to Boise, Idaho

Travelling to Boise in Idaho for my son's wedding.  Notes written on 2nd Jan relating to 1st Jan. 

We spent some thirty hours getting from our house to the my daughter-in-law-to-be's house in Boise.  That was leaving our house at around 9.45 am on our Sunday, and arriving in Boise at around 7.30 at night their time.  There were breaks between our arrival in Auckland and leaving again, and the same at the Los Angeles end.  This added considerably to the length of the trip.   I’d picked up a cold the night below we left, and was feeling too tired to do anything much, so in a way I was quite relaxed about the trip, more than I would have been otherwise.   It meant on one hand I read no more than half a dozen Kindle pages on the two first plane trips, and didn’t even read in the airports, and on the other felt quite comfortable about the great length of time the trip involved.   I only began to feel alive again by the time we got to Los Angeles (and this was after a night of not really sleeping well on the plane - though at least I did sleep; Celia didn’t much at all), and that was when I started reading again, finishing off The Eyre Affair (a novel recommended to me by a friend).  My cold seemed more like really bad hay fever, in the end, and I got something to offset that at a pharmacy in the Auckland airport, and along with vitamin C tablets and Panadene, kept me more alive than otherwise.

We didn't have to worry about our bags anywhere, after Dunedin, which was good (only the easy little transfer from one room to another at Los Angeles); the only stuff we were carrying were a largish black holdall with some clothes and odds and ends, and Celia’s backpack with various items including the laptop, and her purse, which carried everything else.   My older son had told us that there was a quiet spot along by Gates 5-10 at Auckland, and so after having some lunch and going through security, we stayed there for the afternoon, having the occasional snooze laid out full-length on the seat.   It was fairly muggy in Auckland, and earlier on we’d stayed outside for a bit, but it drizzled occasionally, and the place we’d chosen was obviously the smoker’s ’hut’, so we didn't stay there long.  

Our plane for Los Angeles left around 7, and we’d been able to get a two-seater, right towards the back.  This was good because we didn’t want to be sorting out with another person all the way (or two, if we were in a four-seater - there are no five-seaters on these planes), and meant we could spread ourselves a bit in terms of luggage.   However, we’d hardly got off the ground before the young married couple in front of us pushed their seats right back as far as they would go - this meant not only were we more cramped but we couldn’t easily watch the little movie screens.  We pushed our own seats back, but being the last row we couldn’t push too far back.   I asked the girl if she would mind moving the seat back a little more forward again, and she did, but her husband wasn’t nearly so obliging, and for much of the trip, including during the night, he kept it pushed right back.  We talked to the hostess early in the piece but she wasn’t in the mood for confrontation it seemed, and didn’t do anything, even though Celia said it was hard on her back being forced to sit that way.  Next morning, when breakfast was being served, the (very) old steward (he was older than me, I think!), without much persuasion got the guy to put his seat up straight - the guy’s comment was, What, further?  However, we both survived.  Celia said afterwards the man had very long legs, and would have been cramped too, but…

The staff began to serve the evening meal very soon after we took off, but in spite of that we didn’t get our meal until around 9.30 by which time there was no choice - one type of meal had been used up completely.  The older steward commented that at least at breakfast we’d be first on the list, but even then he only meant that we’d be in the first serving, rather than being first altogether.  

There was a huge choice of movies and tv programs, but the noise in the plane made it hard to hear some dialogue easily, so some movies were more accessible than others.  I started to watch Puss in Boots, but apart from it being a bit inane, it was set at night for quite a while at the beginning and didn’t show up well.  So I gave up on that and watched the oldie, The Night of the Hunter.  Directed by Charles Laughton it was a rather weak story layered with pseudo-symbolism and some hysteria.   The boy who was one of the main characters (Billy Chapin) wasn't too bad, but his little sister (Sally Jane Bruce) was weak.   Robert Mitchum played the supposed preacher who went round marrying women for their money and then murdering them, and Lillian Gish the old lady who eventually took the children in.  Shelley Winters was in it for about two-thirds and had a rather underwritten role - she became Mitchum’s latest victim.  The film also seemed to reach its climax and then develop a whole new section, making it seem more longwinded than it probably was.   Of course I had a meal in the middle so that didn‘t help it to be more cohesive.  Roger Ebert gives it a rave review, calling it 'one of the greatest of all American films,' which seems a bit over the top for the otherwise sound Ebert. 

I tried watching Jane Eyre as well, but the sound was just a blur, so I gave up, and watched, out of the corner of my eye, and without sound, Drive, with Ryan Gosling.   It looked very slow, but well made - and increasingly violent.  Celia switched it off before it finished. 

As we were starting to descend my ears began to ache something awful - to do with the cold, no doubt.  They wouldn’t clear and it was extremely painful.  The same thing happened, to a lesser extent, coming down into Boise.  

Los Angeles airport was an unpleasant place: lacking in humanity somehow, very undecorated, huge and awkwardly laid out - we landed at Gate one and had to go to Gate seven, which was a good hike around the ‘horseshoe’ that forms the airport.   We could have got a shuttle, but it seemed reasonable to walk, even though it was fairly warm - hot in fact, considering it‘s winter here.  We decided to go up to the third floor to check out the departures section, thinking there would be restaurants, cafes etc.  Nope, nothing but the security section, and an enormous queue, many of them standing out on a bridge that led into the security section, in the heat.  Incidentally, the queue at Auckland into the plane to Los Angeles took forever - we sat waiting to join it and waited and waited.  It never came to an end, and it began to look as though it never would before the flight was supposed to take off.  They were trying to process both Los Angeles and San Francisco flights, but they didn’t have a computer system, for some reason, and everything was being done manually.   It seemed impossible to believe that that many people would be getting on one plane. 

I had a bit of a meltdown at the LA security: they were being rather over-the-top, and when he told me not only to take off my money belt, but my trouser belt, and my handkerchiefs out of the pocket, I had had it.  I didn’t go off at the security people but to Celia, who told me to pull myself together. Anyway, we got past security and discovered that on the other side of security there were some places, like two Starbucks for example, and a couple of bars, and a newsagents, but that was almost it.   Had some rather expensive lunches sealed up in plastic boxes, and got coffees (after discovering that the girl behind the bar and I were both deaf - she couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t understand her - partly cultural linguistics and partly blocked ears from the plane).   Celia had a sleep, and, finally feeling better, I did some reading.  The plane to Boise was a fifty-seater, not too noisy, and served by one hostess who rattled through all the safety precautions at such speed that if you didn’t know the instructions from having heard them dozens of other times, you’d have had no idea what she was talking about. 

Finally arrived in Boise and met by my son and his fiancée.   Relief!