Few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. That I positively hate surprises. Don't get me wrong, over the years, I've done my share of looking at the last page of a of book to find out how it all ends and fast forwarding to the end of the movies to see the climax, but how far would you go to spoil it all?
To illustrate a point, two weeks ago I booked a special "Mystery Break" for Subarna for her birthday. Now, here's the deal. You book it through Air New Zealand by paying a fixed fee and they give you a booking number. That's it. On the day of journey, you turn up at the airport with an ID and they tell you where you're going. I was told that it could be anywhere in NZ and was asked by Kim, the very helpful AirNZ sales rep, that, is there anyplace we wouldn't like to go. I said Auckland, for the simple reason that we've been there so many times.
Now after a few days for no apparent reason, panic set in. What if they send us to Wellington? That's couple of hours from here and we certainly wouldn't like to go there. The deal was a flight to a domestic destination, airport transfer, one night in a hotel and return flights. But to fly to Wellington is thirty minutes and then what? We go to Wellington once every couple of months and there is nothing we can see or do there that we haven't already done!!
I went into my sleuth mode. They asked us to be at the airport at six-thirty in the morning, so I figured if I can find the outgoing flights after that time, I might have a crack at guessing where we're heading. It looked like the choice came to three places, Auckland, Christchurch or Nelson. Since I said no to Auckland, my guess was between the other two. However, many of the domestic flights fly out of Auckland, specially to Coromandel or the Bay of Islands. So in a way I was none the wiser. But at least it wasn't Wellington!!
The next day as we went to the airport and stood in the counter, they handed us an envelope. Subarna opened it...... and it was, Christchurch after all. Good on ya Air New Zealand!!
But the biggest surprise was for the Birthday girl. The hotel had put a nice bouquet of roses on the bed.
The Shriek she gave on seeing the roses really surprised all of us!!
