Watching Home Alone At Airport

Who doesn’t include the possibility of hitchhiking as part of their pre-Christmas planning? Nobody? Oh, okay then. Well, before I was able to change my flight, on December 24th, it was looking like I might miss all the buses and trains from the city of Brisbane to the beach town, Byron Bay. Instead, I opted to gift myself a night in the Auckland airport (ranked 7th in the world by sleepinginairports.net) in order to make my 6AM flight to Brisbane.

I was pretty surprised when I showed up at 10PM that there were already many people settling in to spend the night amongst the luxurious, padded bench seating in the food court. A true Christmas miracle, I was able to find both the Qantas Club Wi-Fi signal and username/password, enabling me to avoid the insanely high rates that the airport charges for internet access. Merry Christmas indeed. After surfing myself towards drowsiness, I put my sleep mask on and my earplugs in. I’m not the heaviest sleeper to be sure, but the constant hubbub of passengers-in-waiting and the cleaners vacuuming the floors made it tough to catch some sleep. I did manage a few hours though, and was washed up (Duty Free cologne samples are useful as well…) and ready to go for the 3:30AM check-in counter opening.

Continue Reading…