Arriving in New Zealand

The AirStream RetroEspresso outside Auckland airport. Photo by David Lansing.

It starts on a Friday afternoon, catching the red-eye to New Zealand, and then after two or three in-flight movies and a couple of meals, you’ve arrived and it’s 5:30am Sunday morning in Auckland. Whatever happened to Saturday?

Cloudy, dark, a bit of rain. And on the long walk to the domestic terminal to catch your connecting flight to Dunedin you stop in front of an old AirStream trailer, parked outside the terminal, converted in to the RetroEspresso cafe. Brilliant.

But the young girl pulling you a flat white refuses the fifty-cent New Zealand coin you dredge up from your baggie of collected travel money. “We don’t take those anymore,” she says.

Don’t take a fifty-cent New Zealand coin in New Zealand? Why’s that?

“It’s old money,” she says, sliding over the steaming coffee to me. “Haven’t taken those coins in years.”

Has it really been that long since I’ve been to New Zealand?

Evidently.