A Day in Auckland

This is our first full day in Auckland, New Zealand. We got about 12 hours sleep last night, so hopefully, this post will sound a little more coherent than the last few.  We had a very touristy day today, and despite the ongoing showers randomly throughout the day, we had a great deal of fun. We visited the art museum in the morning and then we went on a three hour mini-coach tour around the city in the afternoon.  We saw all the major highlights, and then in the evening we went to the Sky City Tower for a view over the city and dinner at the revolving restaurant on the tower.  

Here are a few pictures....although I have only a few of our tour, as the rain on the glass made most of those pictures useless, LOL.  Like this one:

That's the best of all the raindrop pictures that were taken today. And believe me there were a lot that you couldn't even tell what was behind the raindrops.  (That tall tower in the distance is the Sky City tower)

Here are a couple for Betty because she loves the water lilies so much.

And these are for Dan, my orchid sitter.

And these are for everyone just because they were pretty at the Wintergarden.

You'll just have to pretend you can see the sheep on the hill at One Tree Hill, and the volcano at Mount Eden, and the shops in Parnell, and the yachts in the harbor.

I do have some from the tower and dinner:

Looking down through the floor of the observation deck.

Of course, I had to have lamb for dinner

Yes, it was delicious!

And I will end with a couple views from the tower at the end of dinner.

Made it!

After a really long and tiring, but uneventful trip, we are in New Zealand after only 23 hours of travel. We are having a lovely dinner at a place called Elliot stables, which is sort of an upscale food court. The restaurants are around the outside, the tables are in the middle and you order from the restaurants which then brings the food to your table. After this were going to go back to the hotel and crash. 

Hurry up and wait....

We had a lovely visit to Laguna Beach, saw my Dad as mentioned yesterday, and went to the Getty Museum this afternoon.  Absolutely gorgeous buildings, grounds and an incredible collection of art.  Much more than can be appreciated in just an afternoon, but it was a fun diversion.  Just as rush hour was beginning to hit it's stride, we headed back to the airport to turn in the rental car.  We allotted plenty of time, but even so, it took about one hour to travel ten miles.  This will not surprise our CA friends, but I just have to say to our Albuquerque folks that we have it pretty good traffic-wise.

I'm typing this on the iPad, and the pictures are all on Tom's phone, so I just went through a little half hour exercise in getting them sent via email to this device so I could post them.  Not very hard except it was a little tricky to get everything connected to the wifi here at the airport.  Anyway...here was our afternoon:

And, now we are at the airport very, very, very early whiling away our spare hours until we board the plane...about three more hours for that. At least they have free wifi, we can charge up our devices, and Tom has gone shopping while I guard the carry-on bags at our essentially empty gate.  Both of us freshened up and have put on our comfy clothes for the long 14 hour flight.  We'll have a 1-2 hour layover in Sydney and then a three hour flight to Auckland.  So basically, when you all get up Saturday morning and read this, we'll be less than halfway there, LOL.

Stopover number 1

We didn't go all that far, but we knew it when we started out. Landed at LAX without any trouble, had three seats for the two of us, got our bags, jumped on the Hertz shuttle, found the rental car and were on our way maneuvering through the LA freeway system within 45 minutes of landing.  Since when is LA that efficient??

 

53 minutes later we were at Dad's house having been told by Google maps that instead of the usual route (405 to 22) there was some traffic and it would be faster to take the parallel-ish route which was take the 405->105->605->91->5->22.We would never in a million years have thought to take that route instead, but it worked out to be faster than the direct 405.  Of course, the carpool lane helped immensely, too.

Had a very nice lunch and visit with Dad and Ilene and then jumped back in the rental car at 4:30 to try and make it to the condo in Laguna Beach.  Didn't think we had a prayer of making it by 5 when the office closed, but we got there with 6 minutes to spare.  At rush hour!  This is not the California road system either of us remember, nor the one many residents experience.

Made it to the condo and found we have an ocean view room after all...somebody checked out early and we got the room. 😄

That's all for now from our stopover for the night. This time tomorrow we will be checking in for our flights.

Here we go again....

Off to California, Australia, New Zealand