Wednesday - Pacific Ocean

Today is the day that wasn't. We departed LAX Tuesday night and arrived the next morning in Sydney. Except that it was Thursday morning, not Wednesday, when we arrived. Wednesday didn't vanish; it just never was. Intellectually, we can wrap our head around the whole International Date Line bit. In practice, however, we still find it a little weird. But who needs Wednesday anyway?

But today's post is supposed to be for Wednesday. How does one report on a day that never was?

Well, we can report that whatever it was we did, we sure did it in style.

Since Michael's desire to visit New Zealand had remained unfulfilled for fifteen years, we have had fifteen years to accumulate Delta SkyMiles for such a trip. After all that time (and all of Michael's trips to Boston), we had built up enough SkyMiles to get us to Sydney in business class--which meant not just extra leg and elbow room, but fully reclining seats and actual meals.

So on the day that cannot be named, the day that ceased to exist somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, each of us was pampered in our comfy individual business-calss "pods." Each pod included its own entertainment center, a set of noise-reducing headphones, a personal care kit, two pillows and a duvet--and of course, a multi-part reclining seat that was more fully adjustable than a hospital bed. 

For Settling In:Shrimp with grilled pineapple.

For Starters: Tomato-basil soup and
 iceberg lettuce with tomatoes and bleu cheese

Once we had found our seats and stowed our carry-on bags, the flight attendant personally greeted us ("Welcome aboard, Mr. Harward!"), offering glasses of champagne or orange juice to help us relax. (Guess which we chose.) Then she handed us a glossy, four-page menu and invited us to make our selections.  

From the five options for The Main Event course, Michael chose seared mahi-mahi with fruit salsa, haricots verts, plantains and coconut rice; Nancy chose braised beef short ribs with red wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli.  

For the final course of Sweet Delights,  we had vanilla ice cream sundaes with hot fudge sauce, berry coulis, whipped cream and nuts, plus "A Tasting of Sweet Treats," which consisted of a miniature creme brulee and a tiny pecan tart.

The menu also mentioned a Mid-Flight Snack consisting of seasonal fresh fruit, finger sandwiches and cake, but we're not sure anyone on board took advantage of that option because at that point most of us were less interested in eating than in trying to sleep.

The final food service choices, or Almost There, consisted of seasonal fresh fruit served with assorted breakfast breads and condiments, vanilla french toast and scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese and served with chicken sausage and maple syrup, or apple-ricotta crepes with pecans and maple syrup or finally, for the calorie conscious, granola with milk and yogurt. 

Can we have them all? Michael settled on the french toast but found the chicken sausage and scrambled eggs disappointing. Nancy was happier with the apple-ricotta crepes.

Other than having been over-fed, there is nothing left to report. Both the sky and the Pacific Ocean were dark and virtually invisible through most of the fourteen-hour flight. When light eventually did start to appear in the eastern sky, we knew that we would soon be on the ground--and that it would be Thursday.      
                                                                                

A note about the construction of this blog:

Our son Nat sent us a message stating that he found the use of  the third-person POV in our blog posts annoying, because it left him imagining an actual third person shadowing us and recording every move. Our reply: Get over it--and anyway, we haven't been writing strictly in third-person, but in first-person plural. We have used our names to identify ourselves rather than using "I" because both of us have had input into nearly every sentence. The way it works is that Michael writes the initial post, then Nancy edits. It's the type of project that Nancy considers "heavy developmental editing." The only problem is that when the writng is bad, she can't just repeat the copyeditor's mantra: "It's not my book. It's not my book."

Reader Alert: What follows is a lot of technical stuff about the blog that Michael wants to remember, but that will put everyone else to sleep. Think of it as the equivalent of a 14-hour flight.

Initially, we were excited about using Google Blogger because we thought that meant we could use Michael's tablet to edit and publish so we could leave Nancy's heavier notebook in Auckland while we traveled the South Island. It turns out that the Android version of Blogger has a pathetic editor. Entering straight text was such a pain that Michael opted to use the QuickOffice app to compose text, which he then copies and pastes into the blog post. And even though using the Android app directly made it relatively simple to get photos into the post, it doesn't enable you to move them or wrapping text around them. The basic layout was text at the top and pictures at the bottom. Boring.

Also, because the Blogger app does not allow one to adjust the date of the post to correspond to the date of a past event, we "pre-created" one unpublished post for each day of our trip using the online version, and set its date as the date that we wanted the post to represent. Therefore, during the month, when we are ready to record the events of a new day, we just open up its post and pretend that our addition of text is simply editing.

The photography department consists of two permanent employees and anyone else, such as waiters, tour guides, and fellow travelers, who can be conscripted into duty. We decided to take our photos with Nancy's HTC One because the quality is superb (for a lightweight cell-phone camera). We can share them with our other devices via Bluetooth.

When the chief content provider notifies the chief editor that a new draft is ready, the latter brings out her notebook and gets to work. If an extra laptop or PC is available, the content provider takes a first pass at layout, resizing photos and moving them to their appropriate places in the document. All of this requires a relaible internet connection, however, and since that is not often available, we're running several days behind in our actual postings. But considering that we're living almost a full day ahead of most of our readers, we're not quite as far behind as we think we are.