Well, this weekend proved to be more of an adventure than a mystery. The backstory is that I won an Air New Zealand Mystery Weekend for 2 people for 2 nights. I was asked to participate in an online discussion forum about FlyBuys & Air New Zealand Airpoints a few months ago. I made sure to tell them what I thought in detail and was given the mystery weekend for being the best contributor. I only had a few months to use it though, and most weekends were ruled out for one reason or another and so it came down to 12th, 13th & 14th of August.

My flight was one of two to depart at 4:20pm, but because the inbound flight was delayed, we were now scheduled to depart at 4:45pm, and start boarding at 4:25pm. About 5 minutes before boarding was due to start I thought I should probably go to the toilet and get packed up and ready to go. On my way to the toilet, I stopped to look at the view of the hills to the east out of the big picture windows. By the time I came out of the toilets, all I could see out of that window was white. The entire airport was engulfed in a blizzard. It was like being inside a snow globe. Over the next hour, they just kept delaying the flights by 15 minutes at a time, until finally around 5:30pm there was a bit of a break.

My flight was scheduled for 9: 45am. It was still dark at 6am but it didn't look like there had been any further snowfall, and it wasn't snowing anymore. Once it got a bit lighter, we could see that there was a couple of inches of snow, and they sent out a fire engine with a snowplow attachment to start clearing it.