October 11th – Day 6 of “The Commute”

Yes that’s right. From October 9th I time-traveled straight through October 10th right into October 11th!

Another great sunrise over the South Pacific (though I didn’t get any good photos, the colors were really nice and separated and I got the full rainbow ROYGBIV)! We landed in Christchurch around 7am, and boy do these Kiwis take COVID protocol seriously! Everyone dealing with us or our luggage were wearing full gown PPE with masks and eye/hair coverings.

I got 25 mins of sleep (according to my watch – which was probably just confused by the time change, etc) on a lovely 13 hr flight. Hopefully I can stay up past dinner tonight and then get onto a normal sleep schedule. That’s generally how I attempt long-haul flights since I can’t sleep well (or at all) on planes – just stay up for ~36 hours and then get a nice nights sleep the following night.

I watched the movie Tenet on the plane and was sorely disappointed…

After arriving in the terminal we were ushered to buses which would then take us to our MIQ hotel. I had presumed that the hotel was just a normal hotel, operating with some extra precautions, but I was very mistaken. The NZ Defense Force is operating this place and it is a serious managed isolation operation. They’ve got things really down-pat and even have chefs who contact each person and make sure of all their dietary restrictions! Pretty neat.

Our bus was also a quarantine bus – complete with bubble-boy enclosures for us “dirty” passengers.

They even have (large) welcome packets and info sheets for us in the rooms (along with plenty of extra masks, and cleaning supplies — for doing our own dishes).

My room is certainly spacious… and is a nice long almost 30 feet from door to window (measured with my iPhone charger, so I know it’s accurate ha). Here’s why that’s cool – I’ve done the math , if I assume 28 feet long, that’s 56 feet round trip — or one “lap”. That means 1 mile (5280 ft) is 94.3 laps… which also means that a marathon is only ~2470 laps. Now the problem is that my watch’s GPS doesn’t register inside (and probably wouldn’t be accurate enough on this small of a scale back and forth anyway). I’ve tested it out without GPS by running a small 100 lap test — which should be 100 * 56ft ~ 1 mile. My watch thought that it was 1.7 miles (and basically uses my past data to estimate based on cadence, HR, etc), and it took me 15 minutes. So here’s the dilemma: my pace felt fast enough that 1.7 miles is a reasonable distance, but my measurement of the room can’t be off by that much, so 100 laps can’t be that far. I don’t know what to do. Obviously the correct answer is to run the length and not listen to my watch at all… but a 15 minute mile is basically a fast walk and I was running way faster than that!

I am staying on the top floor – the 10th floor – and have a semi-nice view of the mountain range towards the northwest. I say “semi” because of the big abandoned building that obscures some of my view.

Besides staring out my window and failing to understand how speed, time and distance are correlated , I had my required first day COVID test – We’re not allowed out of the room until testing negative ( not even allowed to set your trash outside the room for pickup). Once you test negative, you get a wrist band which allows you to do things like have your trash taken , have your laundry done, and go out to the “outdoor area” during yard time. We will then get tested twice more, during days 6 and 12 of our 2 week quarantine. God forbid someone test negative on day 12… but apparently it’s happened. Somehow.

Tomorrow we have a full day of training and informational zoom meetings (from 8am to 5pm) ugh. Most of the stuff I can probably work through since I’ve been down before, but it’s always hard to work and listen to people talking and try to listen for pertinent new information…