Toronto to San Francisco to Auckland

Flight at 8 am, up at 4:30 to enter the Pearson Airport vortex - daring to shave 30 minutes off the required 3 hr. check-in window.
Despite the numbers of people waiting in various chutes, early morning flights tend to be quieter. Bored kids and fretful babies haven't worked themselves into 'states' and sleepy adults tend to murmer and shuffle. I've negotiated the Air Canada line and successfully avoided the dreaded automated kiosk as an AC greeter waves me through to a real person. I thanked him and said how much I hated those blinking machines that never seem to have my info contained in their bits and bytes. He volunteered that he'd pay $25 each to have them all removed; I told him I'd chip in.

I'm in the U.S. customs line now with a pudgy Dutch couple in front of me. Watching the man unsuccessfully engage two little kids in conversation, I missed the woman's 300 lb. bag toppling over until the hard plastic handle made contact with my thigh. ("Ow!! That hurt!") I guessed that she wasn't a physics prof when she hung her 200 lb. carry-on off the back of said suitcase. "Ever hear of gravity, Edith??" (I read the ID tag on her bag and knew exactly who I was dealing with). She apologized and I rather ingraciously grimaced a clenched-teeth "That's OK."

I had a 7-hour layover in San Francisco, so I hopped a train downtown and walked all over the waterfront in anticipation of my upcoming 13-hour flight to Auckland. If I lost the use of my limbs in transit I wanted to remember what tired feet felt like.