After three days on Paxlovid, I'm feeling much better and Ellen seems to have escaped catching Covid. Another day and a half on drugs and three more days of isolation and we will be free to travel.
We haven't been able to do much nor visit our friends, being in isolation, but we did do an auto tour around the east end of the island yesterday. We figured that as long as we were isolated in the car, it counted (our rationalization anyway). We made a bunch of roadside birding stops on the way and now have 21 new life birds in our restricted first week here.
Unfortunately, our plans are history and we have had to start over planning a trip of 8 fewer days. We spent all of yesterday canceling all our South Island reservations and finally finished up today by canceling our Air New Zealand flight. That was by far the hardest. I spent 4 hours on hold yesterday and 6 hours in Facebook Messenger and Twitter chats with no responses beyond the initial voice tree and chatbots. After another two hours on hold this morning, I reached into LinkedIn (the first use I have ever made of it) and came up with the name of the Chief Customer and Sales Officer for the company. After emailing her, I had a quick response and our reservation was finally cancelled with a credit. Sometimes going to the top actually works.
If we weren't concerned that we wouldn't be able to cancel before the flight and then be considered a no show and Air New Zealand wasn't also trying to recover from having the entire airline shutdown for three days due to the cyclone, we probably wouldn't have needed to go that way but at least it worked.
Our new plans are to nix the South Island and spend half our time traveling on the North Island, dropping down to Kapiti Island then driving back stopping at birding hotspots until we get to Tiritiri Matangi. We will then come back to Waiheke and spend time here and in Auckland visiting the friends and sites we wanted to see this week.
We never thought coming back to NZ would be so challenging!
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