It wasn’t until we got to the hotel in Auckland that Dad discovered our stowaway bear Pumpkin. I knew he wouldn’t be impressed, and he wasn’t. He made us stay at the hotel the whole day while he went out. Oh well, it wasn’t so bad, really. We had plenty of food and used the time to catch up on sleep 
Then came Friday night, the night we were going to fly to Singapore. We got a bus to the airport and it was pouring with rain. Dad had already checked in via the internet, so it was just a matter of taking the luggage to the Singapore Airlines bag drop off counter. We cleared customs and security fairly quickly. Now the wait for boarding and departure began.
Oh, by the way, did I tell you that Pumpkin, Benjamin and I made a couple of new friends in Auckland?
Meet our new friends: Chalky (left) and Bertram (right).
Chalky is very cute and has a blue nose just like me Bertram is lovely and gentle, a real gentlebear!
There were meant to be just two of us on this trip: Benjamin and me. Two became three when we secretly took Pumpkin along, and now there are five of us! Isn’t that funny? 
Flight SQ282 being readied.
This is our plane, a Boeing 777–200, being loaded with yummy food; phew, we won’t go hungry
Departure info at Auckland Airport.
Flight SQ282: “Boarding in 15 mins”. Well, this never happened! After midnight the same message was still showing. Was the board broken? We had no idea what was wrong and started to get hungry. No announcement was ever made about the reason for the delay. Luckily Dad had an emergency food ration in his hand luggage
We happened to overhear a conversation by staff; from what we could gather, there was a technical problem that needed to be sorted out before we could hit the skies.
Then the boarding call. At long last some action! Pushback at 0:44 am and takeoff at 0:56 am.
Finally we were on our way to Singapore!
