Rounding the Devil’s Staircase and dropping the hammer to blow past a campervan is the moment we receive a text message from Air New Zealand: ‘You may have received a message yesterday regarding a 1 hour and 25 minute delay … Rest assured your flight is operating on time as scheduled.’

The easy right curve sharpens and twists left as we feed back to the correct side of the road. I use the incline to bleed our excess speed and take the chicane.

The laugh we’re sharing has a bitter edge like caramel taken a tad too far. You see, we’d called Air NZ that morning, and their customer service rep had confirmed the delay. But we’d queried it because their app still showed ‘flight on time’ and our experienced travel hackles were up.

We couldn’t trust the information from Air NZ, so we’d decided to leave for the airport as originally planned instead of leaving later – even if it meant spending an hour and a half more sat at the airport.

And good job too or we would’ve missed our flight.