No such luck. The lobby of the airport (which is a masterpiece in bad design) was
the ultimate in chaos. It took us almost an hour to get seat allocations. When we
tried to get back to the plane a man at the barrier wanted our yellow forms. "What
yellow forms?" "The yellow forms you get at the seat allocation counter.  So we
fought our way back through the crowd and finally talked somebody into giving us the
correct forms, we filled them out and went back and presented them. There was a
queue of people waiting to get into the aeroplane right outside the shop, we might
have had time to buy a couple of things but we doubted it and lined up like everybody
else.
    The DC-10 is a big aeroplane, from the outside and the inside, The flight was
almost fully booked out and since we'd been late in getting seats we ended up in the
back row of the plane in the middle whero there were three seats. Nobody occupied
the third seat so we had the use of the only vacant seat in the plane.
                                                                     Once again there
was fruit juice all around while we waited and the usual instructions about what to,
do in case of an accident.

We took off with the cabin lights dimmed so far we could see the lights of Auckland
disappearing below us: It was probably a nice sight for the people in the right
seats but most of us were simply in the dark.
                                      Supper was served after we'd been in
the air about half an hour, it was preceded by the menu and when it arrived it was
just as good as the earlier meal we had had. We payed over our money for the
headsets and tuned into all the music which was available from the little holes in
the armrests. Looking at the programme of music listed in the Classical section I
was quite pleased to see the Beethoven Ninth Symphony listed but I soon discovered
that they meant only the 2nd movement and before the film began I had discovered that
the programme only lasted an hour before they went back to the beginning and repeated
the whole lot. We would be in the air for thirteen hours and the prospect of hearing
even that 2nd movement thirteen times in the near future didn't excite me very much.

The film was "Day of the Dolphin" - joy oh joy: If it had been showing at a theatre
over the road, free, I doubt if I would have taken the trouble to go over and see it.
But since we had nothing else to do we watched it. The point of the film seemed to
be that people are even dumber than dolphins and while I may have seen sillier films
no titles spring to mind.
                        The dolphins swam out to sea, into the golden sunset, and
the film ended. Most people settled back to sleep, some went to the toilets and
others turned on their reading lights. Gradually the reading lights went out and
people settled down, I stretched out my legs and tried to sleep, it was difficult
though and hard to believe that we were flying at 32,000 feet over the Pacific,
speeding towards America. Gradually I must have drifted off.

The whole aeroplane seemed to come awake in an instant. One moment it was dark and
quiet and the next moment everybody was awake and everything was bright. What had
probably woken me suddenly was the announcement that it was 7.30 am and, we'd be in
Honolulu in another three hours. According to Valma's watch, which was still set to
Australian Eastern Standard time it was 3 am "tomorrow" morning but who's going to
argue with physical facts like the sun being up.
                                               Two hours out of Honolulu we got fed
breakfast. Following that US immigration and customs forms which we had to fill out
were distributed. The cabin crew, and the forms themselves, made it very clear that
we were to make "No errors, cross outs or abbreviations - and make sure you print hard
enough for a good carbon impression to come out". The crew went around checking to
see that everybody had done it correctly.
                                         After eight hours in the air seeing land
seemed to be a big deal to most of the passengers, but then a lot of them were in a
group obviously bound for Honolulu and not going on to the mainland. So for them
land also meant the end of the journey. Finally the airport came into view and we
lined up on the final approach, coming in low over the water and then suddenly the
runway was beneath us and we touched down. The airport is also an airforce base so as
we taxied to the terminal I could catch my flrst glimpse of some Lockheed "Galaxies"

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