Fiji Air and a spectacular sunset

Fiji Air was not as bad as we expected. The planes are reasonably modern and the attendants are friendly. The food is woeful and the best way to describe its quality is to say that United Airline's food is a step up on the gourmet chain. Or perhaps five steps. Obviously whoever runs that airline has never sampled the food served in economy. It should be a requirement each year for every airline CEO to take an anonymous, unannounced long overnight flight in cattle class.

The seats on their A330 planes are too small for me and the film / movie selection was poor. We have found on other overnight flights that occasionally we can score three or four seats to ourselves by reserving aisle seats on either side of the central section towards the back of the plane if it is not full. All the flights were full and Fiji changed our seat selections in both directions for the LAX - Nandi flights and put us together in the center section.  However, we found that the check in person was helpful and re-allocated us each aisle seats on the flight back. It really helps on the 10 to 14 hour overnight flights to be able to get up every few hours whenever it suits you.

Fiji Air is very strict about the size of carry-on baggage. As you line up to check in, there is a person who checks that your carry on bags meet the dimension limits with no exceptions. Quite a few passengers had to check their oversize carry-on bags which costs extra. We approve and it results in much faster loading and unloading of passengers on the plane at the airport.

So why did we use Fiji Air? Our return flights from the US west coast cost $1126 each compared to roughly $1700 for the other airlines such as Qantas, United, Delta and Virgin. Enough said.

We are doing much better with jet lag this time, probably because it is November and the cold weather makes it easier to sleep. This evening we had probably the most magnificent sunset we have ever seen here.

The photos do not really capture how spectacular it was. 

The blue was really dark. Even looking away from the sunset, the light was really a mix of pink and gold.

The leaves have disappeared and we can see the Chesapeake Bay quite easily. It will stay this way all winter except that there probably will be snow. Definitely a change from Sydney where the temperature was well over 100 degrees the day after we left.