After waking up at 4:30 and driving through crushingly thick fog to get back into Auckland, I was ready and waiting for the AirBus to pick me up and whisk me away to the airport. I had checked the times, double-checked the route, and was sitting and waiting for the bus a good 10min before it was set to arrive – though frustratingly I had seen one bus pass me by while I walked the 15min to the stop.
As I waited I took a final look around the city of Auckland, trying to take in everything that I could in these last few minutes that I’d be able to see the city outside of the airport… but I actually started to get bored looking around at the amazing skyline. I was a bit worried that I was jaded, until I looked at my watch and realized that I had been staring at said skyline for nearly 25minutes… 15min past when the bus was slated to arrive. I waited another 10minutes before I started to get a bit worried… I asked around and people said that the AirBus does usually stop there, but that they hadn’t seen any that morning aside from the one that passed me by. This worried me, and after another 10minutes of waiting, I realized that I had to call a shuttle or a cab at this point, since waiting any longer would be quite detrimental to actually catching my flight.
As it was, the shuttle company laughed at me when I called, saying “Man, there is no way that you’re catching you plane at this point. Hah, good luck!”. This of course didn’t really help my mental state at the time, but thankfully I had another ace up my sleeve – the Auckland Taxi company and their insane ability to tear through traffic, or at least so the rumors went. I called, got a quote ($60 instead of the expected $15 for the bus), and called the cabby in. Just before he arrived an AirBus did finally come by… but it declined to stop for me, the driver simply waved to me and kept driving as I tried to flag him down. I don’t like Auckland I think.
After that… interesting… incident with the bus, the cabby did arrive and we tossed my bags into the car and I jumped in, barely a second before he melted rubber and started flying towards the airport. Soon enough we were trapped in traffic, (Ed Note: See the “People I’ve met on or near my Flights” for our topic of conversation on the drive into the airport) but thankfully the skills of Auckland’s cab drivers had not been overstated, and he was able to find his way through the gridlock and dropped me off at the airport in record time, easily early enough for me to check my bags in, swish through security, and have a bit of time extra to charge up my iPod and Kindle before the flight.