Day 0 - Newcastle Airport

Aaand she's off!!  The first "proper" holiday blog is brought to you over Wifi from Newcastle Airport.  The rest of them might not be so frequent, or so long....don't worry :-)

It's been a fun final week in the UK - unusually cold weather, snow and ice has cause havoc with flights and had me convinced that my journey would start with delays and disaster.  Fortunately, the last few days have been much warmer so although my plane is currently showing as delayed, it's only a "normal" delay of 20 minutes rather than the hours it would have been had I flown this time last week.

I thought I had everything timed, planned and under control until two things happened presumably as a result of the extra cold weather....

Firstly my boiler started leaking - the engineer who came out this morning to fix it tells me it was because the pipe outside froze and stopped the boiler from draining.  So today suddenly had to include a swift trip to B&Q to buy pipe insulation in an attempt to stop the same thing from happening again.

Secondly, I suddenly realised that my monthly contact lenses had not yet appeared in the post and I had been relying on that delivery to see me safely around New Zealand.  Several frantic phone calls with the opticians later....and the lovely people in D&A had managed to find some spare lenses that I could pick up and take with me.

So many thanks to Lynn who dropped everything that she had planned for this afternoon in order to drive me to the airport via the city centre and make sure that I arrived in plenty of time for my flight.  And thanks also to Tracey, Simon, Lynn & Andy who are house-sitting, valuable item-sitting or otherwise being on call in case of more emergencies while I'm away.

50 minutes to kill until my first flight.  I'll finish this blog here, and hopefully the next post will come from somewhere more exotic than Newcastle Airport!