Beginning

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step - or so Confucius is supposed to have said.  My own journey from the land of fantails (Aotearoa/New Zealand) to the state of the Black-capped Chickadee (Massachusetts, USA) began with a drive around the bays of Wellington and one mislaid suitcase.  Far be it from me to do things by halves as, in actual fact, the journey I undertook was actually 9119.649 miles (14676.653km for us metric users) and it took 4 plane rides, 2 of which we missed and had to be rescheduled, 4 car trips, too much fastfood and all the patience that I could possibly fathom.  Oh, and a ride on a train in the Washington Dulles airport which made me feel like I was taking an after-hours tour of a Sci-Fi set.

I arrived to a mild day near the end of summer; at least my new household considered it mild.  86°F or 30°C is not what I would consider mild - not by a long shot.  Some people make the innocent mistake of thinking that New Zealand is tropical.  It is not.  Wellington is known as "The Windy City" for a reason; a gale-force strength reason.  NZ is sub-tropical, with a stress on the sub, and I like to remind people that we are neighbours with Antarctica.  Yes, we have snow - we have some great ski fields in fact - heck, it even snowed at sea level in Wellington a week or so before I left!  I came from the end of a cold, wet and windy winter to the tail-end of a summer in which it gets hotter than my place of birth can get without volcanic activity on a serious scale.

So, it was hot.  Did I mention that enough yet?  I was also miserably tired because I find it far too uncomfortable to sleep on a plane in economy class - except for when my fiancé was kindly lending his lap to me as a pillow - and our trip had taken from 1pm Tuesday 30 August (GMT+12) to 3pm Wednesday August 31 (GMT -5).  That's almost 60 hours of travel.  Admittedly, missing our flight from San Francisco to Washington and the subsequent flight from Washington to Providence, Rhode Island was something of a blessing in disguise.  My fiancé's brother had gone to a lot of effort to come out to see us for the brief few minutes while we stood in line at San Francisco airport security on the way to the gate for our next flight.  We had been held up in immigration for a good hour because, apparently, I suck at following instructions.  Once we missed the flight, and found we had to catch much later flights, he kindly came out yet again and picked us up, drove us to his home and let us shower and crash on his futon fold-down sofa bed.  This was the first time I had met him and the first time my fiancé had seen his brother in two years.  Though we spent the majority of our time there sleeping, we got to chat in the car to and from the airport and his hilarious stories were a much needed stress reliever.  I think we owe him a fruit basket, at the very least.

Back in Massachusetts, once we had dragged our suitcases out of the car and ourselves up the stairs, we arrived to a room which looked more like a museum than a bedroom.  My future father-in-law is an avid collector of antiques - specifically antique technology such as wooden radios, early television sets and phonographs - and he has increasingly run out of space in the 4 bedrooms, 2 sitting rooms, 1 dining room, 1 kitchen, 1 laundry room, 3 bathroom, double garage, attic and the large basement of his house.  The 2 rooms we wanted to use, which I had spent 3 weeks cleaning 3 months previously, were filled with antiques and over-flowing storage boxes of items which were long past being useful.  Disheartened, but exhausted, we slept like the dead.