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The flight from Auckland to LA was perhaps the bumpiest I've ever experienced. There were no hot drinks served for the duration, but they did get the meals to us on time. I had a good seat - right at the back of the plane where the fuselage narrows there are 2 seats instead of 3 in the side bays and I got one of them, on the aisle with a wide space beside me and extra legroom in front. I managed some sleep. Then it was LAX, with the terminal looking all modern and clean and neat, and a large staff of uniformed people keeping the swarms of us moving through their system. It was surprisingly and pleasantly efficient, quick and friendly. Then I had about 20 minutes of walking from terminal 4 to terminal 7, a couple of hours in a lounge and a couple more in a Canadair regional jet. We flew over that vast swathe of California and Nevada that seems devoid of trees and full of canyons. I saw Las Vegas below me, then the dusty grey brown landscape became speckled with snow as it ...

The view from our deck about a week ago, 7 am Tomorrow I fly to Aspen Colorado, and, after a few days wait will go just out of town to Snowmass, and St. Benedict's Monsastery where I'm taking part in a ten day post intensive Centering Prayer retreat. It's silent, not even any eye contact, and involves many hours a day in concentrated meditation. Am I looking forward to it? Well, actually, no. There will be no escape, nothing that must urgently need attending to, no knock at the door or phone call to save me from facing myself. But I know that's where I need to be. And I know I will be in good hands. There's no internet and no cellphone coverage, so I'll be out of touch. Clemency and Debbie will have a phone number where I can be reached but I'm not expecting either of them to use it.

Long haul flights have a sameness about them. You sit, read, watch, toss, turn sleep, toss turn, stretch, queue, pee, toss, turn, eat, drink, read and watch some more, toss and turn. Every so often, after a long long interval, you disembark, sit in a viewless soulless joyless room for a while, reembark and continue as above. This every so often activity is 'the stopover', where all of the fuel, and some of the supplies, cargo and passengers get changed for fresh ones. Flight NZ2 had one in Los Angeles. Everywhere in the world, on stopovers, passengers are speedily ushered into an isolated part of the airport, left to their own devices, safely separate from all that is happening in the rest of the airport, and indeed the world, then speedily ushered onto the plane again. But no longer in the USA apparently. Since 9/11 the authorities have insisted on photographing us all and finger printing us all lest we do something dastardly, such as, I suppose, taking more than our fair sh...

We flew out of London on Sunday morning and after an hour or two in Munich flew across Greenland and Canada to San Francisco. I had booked a rental car but picking it up at about 7:30pm found a most pleasant error had occured. The car company was all out of the little piddling autos that I had booked and instead gave me a bigger one. It was a Chrysler Sebring convertible, a very handsome car, although one that was quite typically American in its handling and performance: great as long as you are going in a straight line and on a level surface. After the usual jitters occasioned by sitting on the wrong side of the car and driving on the wrong side of the road, we had a very pleasant three days swanning about in the Californian sunshine. On Monday we crossed the Golden Gate into Marin county and visited my Alma Mater. The locals call the seminary complex Camelot , and a first glance would tell you why. San Francisco Theological Seminary is all stone and wood and copper towers, set amongs...