Hello, Air New Zealand Flight 4 from Auckland to Los Angeles

October 6, 2024, 11:51 PM PDT by Parkzer • Flights

In case you missed it from my previous… nine blog posts, I spent the last week and a half exploring New Zealand with my friend Doug Wreden.

We originally went on the trip to fulfill an inside joke among his live streaming community as a reward for achieving a stretch goal of over half a million dollars raised for charity during Doug’s annual fundraising event supporting the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation. One of the jokes was to go purchase Burberry Hero cologne; the other was to be a tourist at the Auckland aquarium, on theme with the ocean conservation efforts of the Foundation.

While on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, we decided to fit in some more activities in addition to visiting the aquarium—namely, doing a coast-to-coast walk across Auckland (and, in the process, climbing Mount Eden and One Tree Hill), descending into the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, venturing across Tūrangi, walking around the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, and checking out the New Zealand Maritime Museum, all while eating a bunch of food.

Our time in New Zealand has now come to an end, and we just flew back to the United States. Because of the drastic time zone difference, we left New Zealand during the afternoon and landed back in the United States the morning of the same day. Our flight back… was interesting.

Throughout the trip, Doug and I vaguely split most of the expenses, but the travel costs themselves were almost entirely covered by Doug, i.e., he paid out-of-pocket for both of our premium economy seats. Premium economy on long international flights are different than shorter domestic flights—on domestic flights, you usually just get a little bit of extra leg room, but on international flights, premium economy comes with noticeably larger seats (with more width, pitch, and legroom) with footrests. The point is, they’re already pretty nice.

However, I know that there are even nicer and shinier business class seats further up in the front of the plane. Unfortunately, upgrading to business class would’ve been an additional ~US$4,000.00 per person, and considering that we had already spent thousands of dollars on our premium economy seats, it didn’t seem practical to pay for business class seats. Unless…

Air New Zealand has this interesting feature called OneUp™ where you can bid for discounted seats in a higher class that hadn’t been purchased. This piqued my interest, because it meant that we might be able to fly in business class without spending an additional ~US$8,000.00. I started doing some research on travel forums to see the optimal bid amount for upgrades between Los Angeles and Auckland.

Considering that Doug had purchased both of our tickets, I thought it would be reasonable to spend my own money to pay for our upgrades. I put in a bid for US$640.00 per person per leg, for a total of US$2,560.00. If this got accepted, we would be getting business class upgrades for a ~68% discount. Unfortunately, the business class cabin was full on the way to Auckland, so my bid was declined for our outbound flight… but luckily, my bid did get accepted for our inbound flight back to the United States.

Because of our upgrade, we got to enjoy priority check-in and express security, then relax at the Air New Zealand Auckland International Lounge before our flight. I’m a Priority Pass member so I’ve been to a lot of these before, but this was Doug’s first time in an airport lounge. He brought back and enjoyed a plate containing a gigantic mound of broccoli from the lounge buffet, then took a shower in the lounge so that he can say he has showered in an airport before.

The lounge had a nice view of the gates from its floor-to-ceiling windows.

Air New Zealand’s business class cabin is… strange, to say the least. I have never seen a business class cabin in this layout where everyone is basically all facing into the aisle and looking at each other. Fortunately, I looked up some YouTube videos of Air New Zealand’s Boeing 777-300s ahead of time and found this out, so when we reserved our seats, I made sure to grab seats in the 12th and final row of business class by the bulkhead and curtain so that we would have as much privacy as possible and everyone else in business class wouldn’t be staring at the back of our heads the entire flight.

Once we boarded, we got some beverages as pre-departure service.

Because of the angle of the seats, looking out the window was difficult; I had to turn my body about 120° to the right to snap this photograph of the tarmac.

After a short half-hour departure delay, we took off from Auckland Airport.

Meal service began right around an hour into the flight. We started with an amuse-bouche of confit potato with onion crème fraîche whip and chives.

As the appetizer, I was served crayfish bisque with chive crème fraîche and croutons. I also received a side of garlic bread and a roll.

Hello, Douglas Douglas.

As my main entrée, I opted to get seared New Zealand snapper with escabeche vegetables, smoked mussels, white beans, and fresh dill.

For dessert, I had warmed pear pudding with ginger caramel and spiced custard sauce.

After finishing our meal, we discovered an app on our in-flight entertainment system called SeatChat. Prior to using the app, you had to accept their terms of service, which explicitly stated that the platform should not be used for inappropriate communications. Of course, Doug’s very first message after sending the initial invite message immediately breached the terms of service by implying that there is a bomb.

For the past few weeks, my friend Billie-Rae has been insistent that I should play World of Warcraft in random and irrelevant places out in public. The thing is, I can’t play World of Warcraft unless I am at my desk setup because all my games are installed on an external SSD that I plug into my dock, into which I plug my laptop.

Regardless, I decided to feed into her joke by whipping out my laptop on the plane and using in-flight wifi to go on Google Images and search for “World of Warcraft gameplay” so I could take this photo and make it look like I was gaming at 33,000 feet in altitude. I sent it to her and managed to trick her for a few seconds, even though the screenshot I picked was terrible because it had black bars around the edges that I didn’t notice at the time.

Afterwards, I put away my laptop and asked the flight attendant to assist with converting my seat into lie-flat mode so I could go to sleep for the night.

… I only got an hour and a half of sleep. Not because the bed was uncomfortable or anything; in fact, this was probably the most comfortable lie-flat seat I’ve ever experienced on a plane.

The reason I couldn’t sleep is because THE WOMAN IN THE SEAT NEXT TO ME KEPT FARTING, AND IT SMELLED SO BAD THAT THE STENCH WOKE ME UP EVERY TIME I FELL ASLEEP.

Anyway, good morning. With about two and a half hours left to go on the flight, breakfast service started.

To start, I was served a croissant…

… some granola with milk and apple juice…

… and a fruit bowl with strawberry, pineapple, cantaloupe, melon, and orange.

My main entrée was banana waffles with roasted apple, boysenberry yogurt, and apple cinnamon butter.

After just shy of 12 hours travel time, we made it back to the United States and landed in foggy Los Angeles.

This was an unexpectedly nice trip. At first, I approached this as more of an obligation rather than a vacation, but after Doug and I started planning our activities, I realized it could actually be pretty enjoyable. Once I got there and started adventuring, it was very pleasant. The business class upgrade on our return flight obviously added a memorable luxurious touch to the conclusion, but even without it, New Zealand was a good experience.

Hello, JetBlue flight 188 from Los Angeles to Boston

March 19, 2024, 11:37 PM PDT by Parkzer • Flights

I just arrived in Boston, Massachusetts for PAX East.

This is my first time in Boston since before the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the last time I was in Boston was basically immediately before the pandemic—I attended PAX East 2020 as a panelist, and during the convention, news was breaking about the coronavirus having moved from China to the United States. We know a lot about COVID-19 now, but back then, the virus was new and information about it was scarce. In response, I basically didn’t do anything in Boston except for show up to speak at my panel, then immediately left the convention center to limit my exposure to other people.

Now that it’s been a couple years since a majority of the world has deemed the COVID-19 pandemic to no longer be a threat, I figured 2024 would be a good year to head back to PAX East to enjoy a convention pre-pandemic-style. A few of my friends are panelists this year, and I’m also looking forward to checking out other parts of Boston.

On my way to Boston, I flew JetBlue flight 188 from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Boston Logan International Airport (BOS). I decided to fly out of Los Angeles instead of my home airport in Las Vegas because flights out of LAX were cheaper, and it was easy for me to coordinate some other things to take care of in LA to fall shortly prior to my departure.

There was a woman seated across the aisle from me with a baby that cried for about a fifth of the duration of the flight, but otherwise, everything else went fairly smoothly and uneventfully.

Meal service started with a welcome pastry. I’m not sure what exactly they were, but they tasted like a combination of very nutty cookies and crackers.

My first entrée was shrimp atop broasted fennel in saffron broth and topped with potato crumble. It was mediocre, but was still my favorite dish of the meal.

Next was roasted chicken with almond romesco topped with rosemary breadcrumbs. The chicken was extremely dry and the sauce tasted a bit incomplete, as if it was missing an aspect of richness to it.

Finally, the last dish was lasagna with fonduta, wild mushrooms, and fontina. It was extremely cheesy, even after scraping off the excess cheese topping. It sort of tasted like I was eating a little block of cheese, and couldn’t really tell if it even had any pasta sheets inside of it.

The three small plates came with a side of bread and extra virgin olive oil.

For my beverage, I ordered a non-alcoholic Mint Condition made from seltzer, ginger, lime, cucumber, and mint. It was clean and refreshing.

For dessert, I was served vanilla gelato topped with strawberry jam and sprinkled with devil’s food cake crumble. It was an interesting combination of flavors, and I liked the texture better after I mixed it up to a smoother ice cream consistency.

After about five hours, we began our descent and approach to Boston.

We touched down in Boston to a nice and chilly 40°F, or just over 4°C—quite the difference from a Los Angeles departing temperature of 68°F, or 20°C.

Like usual, I like to travel with an extra buffer day so I have an opportunity to recover before heading into the convention and socializing with friends. PAX East is taking place from the 21st until the 24th, then I’ll be headed back to Los Angeles on the 26th.

My first first class airline experience

November 26, 2016, 11:15 PM PST by Parkzer • Flights

This post is over 9 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

Shipping stuff across the entire country is expensive.

So expensive, in fact, that it was actually almost cheaper to pay extra and fly first class from Chicago to Los Angeles to take advantage of all the free checked bags that come along with first class. I think the price difference was actually right around US$50.00, and I was willing to pay that much extra for my very first first class airline experience (something I otherwise would not have done, had it not been for the fact that I would’ve needed to pay extra anyway to a shipping company to send my stuff to California).

So how was it? If it wasn’t for the fact that I very specifically needed those free checked bags (which otherwise would’ve been $25 for the first bag, $35 for the second bag, and $150 for the third bag with American Airlines), then I don’t think it would’ve been worth it. With that being said, the only reason it wouldn’t be worth it for me personally is because (1) I am very skinny and (2) I like to sleep on planes.

I think first class can best be summarized as a flying restaurant. Starting from the time you step on the plane, they give you some hot washcloths to clean your hands, then start giving you food in intervals of around 20ish minutes. In the 3.5-hour duration of the flight from ORD to LAX, I think there was only a period of about 1.5 hours or so when there was not a flight attendant present regularly to either take away dirty dishes or give me more food.

You know those snacks that they give you for free in economy? It’s usually either a small pack of cookies, peanuts, or pretzels (“well-traveled pretzels,” as my friend Ed Lam would call them). I got a “premium” version of the peanuts – I instead got a ceramic mini-bowl of assorted nuts (my bowl only had one pistachio, which I pulled out and placed right in the middle of my bowl before photographing it).

After stopping by again for a complimentary drink (which I chose Coca-Cola for my first selection), shortly afterwards, they bring you a meal. The options were either lasagna or a chicken salad; I selected lasagna. Unfortunately, there was a significant amount of turbulence during the meal, so the photo I took is a bit blurry.

After the meal, I also got some fruity cake – I believe it was raspberry – for dessert. Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph my slice of cake.

So back to the reasons why I think it personally isn’t worth it for me. Because I’m so skinny, I actually don’t even take up my entire economy seat. I’ve never had to suffer through having to sit next to someone so fat that they overflow out of their seat, but even if I did, I could actually graciously share some of my seat space with them and still sit comfortably. I’m so skinny in my seat, in fact, that I regularly prop my leg up, sit cross-legged, or fold my legs vertically (with my knees sticking up). There’s actually enough space for me to do that (even with my relatively long legs), and it helps relieve pressure on my back due to seats that don’t recline that much.

As for sleeping on planes, I have a tendency to fall asleep very well in random locations whenever I am forced to be bored and need to pass the time – I think my body feels that is an efficient use of time, as it never hurts to get some more rest and relaxation. I personally feel that a huge appeal of first class is the food service, and if you were to sleep through your entire flight in first class, you would be missing out on a lot of why first class is first class. Instead, I might as well just sit in economy and sleep the whole time, seeing as, apart from like 50 grams of pretzels, you have to pay separately for food in economy class anyway.

At the end of my experience, I juggled way too many bags at once onto my rolling suitcase and made my way out to the Ride Service area in Los Angeles International Airport, awaiting my Uber to whisk me away eastward to my new home.