Getting home

I don't recommend buying flights separately. A through ticket would have reduced my worrying a whole lot on my final day in the States!

My final day was planned like this:
2 hr drive from Glenwood to Portland
1 hr wait at Portland
1.5 hr flight to San Fran
3.5 hr wait at San Fran
Fly home

Unfortunately there was fog at SFO which delayed lots of domestic flights. This meant leaving 3 hours late from Portland, which would have been fine if my international flight had been delayed! Because I didn't have a through ticket to NZ (Portland wasn't part of the Grab-a-Seat deal) I had to get my bags from the baggage carousel at international and get the all the way to Terminal 3 in 30 mins!

Ahh!

Fortunately AirNZ held the checkin open an extra 15mins. So after a nervous 15 mins waiting for my bag, then a race to the airtrain (an automatic train that does a ring of all the terminals) and a whole lot of running later, I got to my gate just as business class was being called. phew. That was my closest call yet. In fact if there had have been a queue at security that would have been it for me... who knows what I would have done!

Lucky for me enough things went right so that I didn't miss my flight like I'd done 4 days earlier... ha! What a ride.