The Trip there

I’d love to say the rest of our flight to New Zealand was uneventful, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. All of our flights were right on time, and despite LAX being a hell hole, we got on our connecting flight without any problem or delay. The flight from L.A. to Auckland is around 12 hours, so we figured if we could get some good sleep on the plane we’d be all ready to go the day we arrived, since we got in at about 6AM. Marlo had asked the pharmacist about any good sleep aids and he recommended melatonin, which is a natural hormone your body creates when you sleep, the pills help you fall asleep ‘naturally’ and you tend to sleep well. At least that is what is supposed to happen. After we ate dinner on the flight we popped one of the melatonin pills to try to zonk out for the rest of the trip. Within about 5 minutes I (Mike) was having convulsions in my window seat. When I regained consciousness Marlo was shaking me and had a look of terror on her face, but I was so out of it I had no idea what had just happened. All I knew is that something was very wrong. I then had another convulsion for about half a minute. When that one ended I had hot and cold flashes for about an hour and then another convulsion. It was a horrible feeling thinking I was going to die on that plane and there was nothing that could be done, we were thousands of miles out over the Pacific ocean, so I just sat there in my seat and waited for the next seizure to come about. Fortunately that was the end of those episodes, but I didn’t know that at the time, I was petrified to go to sleep because I didn’t know when the next one would hit me. After several hours I seemed to return to normal and was able to fall asleep for a bit.

We arrived in Auckland and retrieved our luggage and got our rental car all by 7:30AM and were on the road south to Waitomo where we had bed and breakfast reservations and planned to go through some caves that have some sort of glowing worms in them.