We set off from P's house and drove to Thames to see K, my old school friend. We were staying the night there before driving on to Napier.

K has a busy life with her involvement in the family business and her children. It was really good of her to make time for us and make us so welcome. Thames is a small town but has lots of amenities and is the main town on the Coromandel penninsula. I have posted pics of Thames in my first NZ holiday thread so I didn't really take any pics here...

K was taking her children to football that evening, so me and Sparks just went for a walk. I needed to keep moving, my ankles had blown up like balloons on the long haul flight and my toes were like little sausages. We had a lovely...

Well, there we were, newly arrived in Auckland and off to bed fully expecting to be jet lagged for a couple of days. We didn't sleep the first night at my friend P's house - we lapsed into unconsciousness. I have very little recollection of going to bed after the horrendous journey but, the next thing I knew..... It was 6.30 in the morning and we had slept all night without waking up at an unearthly hour.

I got up to make a brew and played with the dog for a few minutes. Our friends were up shortly after us and got their son off to school. They have really settled in here and live in a lovely place. Later that morning we loaded the dog into the car and went to the beach 10 minutes away.

Well, the dog had a brilliant...

Now, before I get to all of the good bits. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the name of our airline. Most of you can probably guess who it was and lots of people have been shoddily treated by them before.

It was amazing to find that almost everybody we spoke to on holiday has had some sort of bad experience with our airline. The amount of people who have said that they will never use them again is staggering. The night at the hotel in London saw us chatting to people who were going all over the world. A man I spoke to was connecting to a Carribean cruise in the USA, he missed it... The airline just couldn't get him there on time. What an absolute bummer, I would have been seething.

We met up with...

Well actually, it could get a little worse..

We finally arrived in Sydney. The airport in Sydney is marvellous to transfer through. There's no need to collect baggage and the security area is a formality. There we were, going through security. No need to take shoes off, a quick scan of the hand luggage, no queues, we were literally straight through.

We went straight to the transfer desk to collect our onward boarding cards. I gave our tickets to the lady at the transfer desk. She pecked away at the computer for a couple of minutes and...........

COULDN'T FIND ANY RECORD OF US!!!!!!!

By this time, Sparks was too ill to speak and I was a midges dick away from tears. I looked down...

So there we were, sat at Heathrow with hours to kill. I managed to ring my friends in New Zealand and let them know that we would be a full day late. There was supposed to be a big barbie at my friends' house in Thames on the Sunday afternoon. Friends were travelling from Tauranga to be there but we wouldn't be. The barbie was cancelled, we wouldn't get to Thames until the Monday and everyone was back at work by then..

I tried to call our car hire place and couldn't get through. We needed to let them know that we would be 24 hours late, otherwise we would lose our car. In the end, we had to call a friend and give him all of our booking details so that he could e mail them for us..... We owe him a pint or two.

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