Day 1:Tāmaki Makaurau - New York, NY
’ve had a lot of time to think about what Breakfast and Travel Updates would look like in 2025 and for the most part I’ve avoided having these discussions with myself.
It would be a logical thing for the site to keep growing - purchase the breakfastandtravelupdat.es domain, add a web store, provide breakfast maps and breakfast cloud storage. But I’m not interested in having a head to head with the big internet moguls like Yahoo and Xtra. I don’t have the energy for protracted lawsuit.
I’ve decided instead to focus on the best feature that this website provides. Breakfast will remain the key feature of the daily digest. In a time plagued by short form video I will continue to offer you the antidote - a slow moving paragraph of words, a stationary description of every breakfast that I eat on tour, as well as a still photograph that accompanies this description.
I will still provide some travel updates. This depends on our schedule – basically I’m trying to avoid working overtime to keep up with the blog. Please rest assured though that there will be basic itinerary and well-being updates for the parents of band and crew members who read along.
Thank you for your continued support,
Ben
Nau mai
Yesterday we flew from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, to New York, New York.
We were confident, two days of technical rehearsal with Gabe under our belts as we now loaded our equipment down the stairs from Jon’s Karangahape Road studio and into the cargo trailer of a waiting Supershuttle (the Supershuttle is one of the most important modes of transport we have in our beautiful and powerful country, a ten-seat van, beautifully painted with the words supershuttle and a large green arrow to indicate direction of travel). A relaxed ride along the motorway towards the southwest corner of the city had us arriving at Auckland International Airport thirty minutes later and beginning process that really defines the touring experience, the challenge of trying to find an efficient and painless way to transfer thirteen heavy protective equipment cases across small to medium distances.
I would love to say that we had a swift and pleasant airport experience but it was fairly arduous trying to check in a large bag-count across multiple bookings and they punished Jonathan for it by sending him to purgatory, the auxiliary ticketing counter to that forces you to sit in the shame of your poor booking choices as you wait to pay the oversize fees.
NZ2, Air New Zealand’s direct service to New York had a swift boarding of its passengers, and would have lifted off right on schedule if they had only been able to unfasten the tractor from the nose wheel of the aircraft. It wasn’t quite as bad as our last international flight when someone bonked the airbridge into the plane’s nose, but this incident with the stuck tractor was very humiliating for our plane, and took a good hour to get wiggled out.
Finally we were free and taxiing under our own power. Our Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner took to the skies eagerly, and proudly, nose wheel stowed away and plunging into the kind of swallowing darkness that you only experience when you board a twilight flight to cross a vast ocean. It was hot aboard our flight. 25.8°C according to Liz’s travel barometer, and it was scaley 10% humidity. Tristan’s gamble to wear shorts on a long haul paid off as the rest of us sat for the next 16 hours in the personal temperature zone that is on the very cusp of sweating but with no observable liquid on the skin. Something in the zone of a full body clamminess, perhaps.
We settled in, though, seasoned professional travelers that we are and consumed quantities of mediocre food and mediocre cinema before doing our best to sleep through the worst of the flight.
I woke and checked the map, finding that we were across the other side of the Pacific with the Gulf of Mexico visible out my starboard-side window. It was approaching 6pm on the East Coast of Mexico, and this somewhat discombobulating distorting of perceived time made the incoming the breakfast service feel unusual. On a positive note my gut health was thrilled to find out that Air New Zealand has recently decided to include oatmeal in their breakfast menu, a decision that has sent shockwaves through the in-flight breakfast community, a decision that knocked the hotcakes from what looked like a very safe pedestal and replaced them with an option that one could argue is much more suited to reheating, and carries significantly higher nutritional value.
My overnight oats came with a barricade of stewed fruit to bisect the serving dish, as well as a side of hardy fruit salad, a pain au chocolat, a muffin, a pottle of apricot yoghurt, and a muffin.
Jagged ridges belonging to the Appalachian Mountains were my view out the window while I dined on the warm, mealy substance, the last stretch of our flight taking us up the eastern edge of Teneseee and then across the breadth of Virginia. As the final rolled grains of oatmeal left my spoon the final rays of smudged light were leaving the sky and it was under cover of darkness that we made our descent into JFK International, a “high speed descent” according to the captain of our aircraft who must have buttered up the regional air traffic control to gain us this advantage.
It was a strangely short day after that. We passed through immigration without a hitch, the temperament of our East Coast immigration officer having none of the bite that we are used to from landing on the West Coast.
Our tour manager Annie was there to pick us up in a Sprinter van and greeted us warmly, immediately displaying her love language of hugs and cans of flavoured coconut water. The final leg of the journey took us across the northern part of Brooklyn to our resting place in New Jersey, a Holiday Inn that I will review for you now.
Lobby Feel: 10/10 – Welcoming, good chandeliers and fairy lights, friendly service.
Exterior Facade: 2/10 - Horrific cookie-cutter mid tier hotel building.
Green Lighting: 4/10 Several green lights were observed but the majority of external hotel cladding was not illuminated by green light beams.
Business Centre: 8/10 The downstairs business centre was state of the art with a bouncing screensaver (block text with shadow) that tells the time in a digital format (12 hr). The Upstairs business centre was pleasant but lacked the facilities to operate in a digital work environment.
Elevator: 3/10 L shaped and hard to load when you are wheeling large cases around a corner that exists in the elevator.
Lobby Smell: 10/10 I didn’t smell any aggressive fragrance in the lobby.
Bed Height: ?/10 I’m not sure how to score this category. Whether you get a higher score for a higher bed? These beds were a reasonable height and I had no trouble getting in.
Bathroom Soap: 2/10 Dove Soap and Shampoo, or possibly a mystery soap served from a container with the Dove label - these smell bad and feel like they take years of life from my skin.
Corridor Layout: 6/10 Linear but a bit too zig zaggy. I collided with the sides quite often when I was trying take the corners with our larger equipment pieces. Skirting boards could have been attached better.
Awards/Presige: 1/10 This hotel possessed several honors including the 2003 Intercontinetal Hotels Group Excellence award, proudly displaced in the lobby business centre.
Have you stayed in this Holiday Inn? I’d love to hear your thoughts!