Day 51: The rest of today

Of course, when the clock struck midnight in Auckland, marking the end of August 1st, it was only 5am in Phoenix.  This meant that there were still 19 hours left in “today,” bringing my August 1st to a total of 43 hours.

After twelve long hours, our plane finally landed in LA.  I have never been to California, but this hardly counts.  We waited for our gate to clear, and then we were through.  I got through customs quickly, though I was surprised by the twenty visitor lines I had to pass before I came to the two US Citizen lines.  Baggage took much, much longer than usual, as I no longer had the advantage of priority baggage tags.  I didn’t realize our plane held so many bags.  It didn’t help that I was one of the first through customs, so I got to wait the longest.

Once I had my bag, I failed the exit check due to food and my visits to farms, but I just told them what I had, and what I had done, and they let me go.

The domestic American terminal was a mess, jammed full of people.  It wasn’t clear what I needed to do with my bag, so I accidently used the check in machine, when it turned out that I only needed to give them to the TSA guy.  At security, my backpack was so jammed full of stuff that they had to take some out and rescan to figure out what was in there.  Finally, I made it through everything and was in the terminal, still with plenty of time to sit around.

I soon found out that my gate was not technically in this terminal, rather there was a bus that would take me to the American Eagle terminal for departure.  I figured there would be little more than a room there, so I stuck around in the bigger terminal for a while.  When my flight got close, I took the bus over.  The ride was actually rather neat.  The terminal was pretty far away, so we had to drive along the runway for quite a while, giving me the chance to see several planes take off and land.

I was right about the terminal, it was just a big room with seats, a restroom, and a couple of vending machines.  Regardless, my flight was boarding soon, and we were in the air quickly.  The flight was so quick it even surprised the flight attendants.  They were handing out drinks when the seatbelt light came on.  One of them said, “Oh, come on, go tell them we are too busy.”  As it turns out, that was just the warning that we were thirty minutes from landing.

I landed into one of Phoenix’s smaller terminals, which was practically abandoned.  Just as I expected, I landed about an hour before I had left Auckland long ago.  My grandparents were waiting for me right outside of security, just like they said they would be.  We picked up my bags, and grabbed a burger from In-N-Out before heading home.

During the afternoon, I showed them what I had acquired during my trip, and spent several hours showing them my pictures.

Catching up on my history.

I spent a few minutes talking to the neighbors as we went on a walk at sunset.  They have been following my trip, and wanted to see how it went.  I also saw some of the damage from a big storm that came through last night.  All over the golf course, branches and even some entire trees had fallen.  One house had an entire tree uprooted and covering their driveway.

Sunset over the golf course.

Just a little wind damage.

Tomorrow we will leave for Flagstaff, where it will be much cooler and where we can go on some great hikes.