Landed in Auckland, On My Way to Melbourne

It's just before 6am on Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in the departures lounge at Auckland Airport waiting for my final flight through to Melbourne. My journey started off on Friday morning with a train trip up to London, then across to Heathrow for my initial flight to Los Angeles. After a two-hour stopover, it was another flight, twelve hours following eleven hours, for the trip down to Auckland. I've been down to Australia before, for a six-week backpacking trip with Janet back in 2000, but we broke the journey then by stopping in Thailand and this is therefore the longest I've ever flown in one go.

It wasn't too bad, to be honest, as any trip on your own with a book to read and some films to watch is better than going on a flight with the kids - our recent flight over to Greece for the family holiday had my two-year old daughter bounching up and down on my lap for three hours, in contrast just sitting there and getting fed is a bit of a doddle. I flew over with Air New Zealand in Premium Economy - a rule I try and stick to (or get clients to stick to) is to upgrade from coach for long-haul flights when I'm meant to be working the next day, if I'm going over for a conference or event I don't mind slumming it in economy, but if they're expecting me to be up and working the next day, I need to get a bit of a rest. The journey seemed to go pretty quickly actually; I set myself the task of getting Essbase up and running on the flight, installing all the Hyperion System 9 tools and getting cube built, which I managed to do in the end, plus I ran through some of the setup for the first seminar on Monday which will give me a bit less to do when I arrive later today.

Probably the weirdest thing was trying to work out whether I should be awake, trying to sleep and so on, what with all the time-zone changes and crossing the international date line just before we arrived in New Zealand. When I landed in LAX for the touch-down, it was about 4am "my" time, 8pm US time, I've now flown for 12 more hours and it's just past 6am here, but at home it's 7pm. I'll probably do the usual and try and just plough through today, crash out around 8ish and hopefully sleep through to 5 in the morning, which'll give myself a chance to get a shirt ironed and so on for the first seminar in Melbourne.

That's it for now, I'm just finishing off my coffee, chance to take a quick look around before the next flight, 4 hours to Melbourne. Jon and Borkor are also away, over in Qatar working on an OWB and Discoverer/Portal project, so hopefully we might get an update from the two of them over the next two weeks.