June 6, 7, and 8, 2017 - Yep, traveling is always an adventure!

We rejoin our intrepid travelers as they leave Houston on an Air New Zealand flight bound for Auckland, NZ.  This will be a fifteen hour flight!  We have two seats in the four-seat middle section of row 51!  Happily the flight isn’t quite full and Marilyn gets to move to the aisle seat in the side section of the row and I get her aisle seat in the middle section and we each have an empty seat next to us!  And there is a lot of leg room, at least as compared to domestic flights.  

 

During the course of the flight we are served dinner, with seconds on the wine, and a full breakfast.  And in between the flight attendants keep everyone hydrated with fruit-infused water!  There are lots of movies and TV shows to choose from and I watch “Table 19” a cute, if insipid and predictable little comedy, followed by the amazing and intense “Moonlight” which I’ve been wanting to see since it won all those awards!  After that I really, truly, do try to sleep for hours;  when I finally give up on that I watch “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and “Beautiful Creatures.

Chicken with coriander sauce, zucchini, yellow rice, potato salad,

                                       dark chocolate mousse, roll and butter  -  and pinto noir!

    

cheese omelet, tater tots, mixed fruit and strawberry yogurt.

We arrive in Auckland and follow the directions to passport control.  Since we have USA passports we can use the check-in kiosks.  It’s pretty simple; you just insert your passport, and answer two yes or no questions.  Unfortunately Marilyn gets a little impatient with the machine and winds up answering one incorrectly so she has to go through the control agent.  Then we have to collect our luggage and go through customs.  That’s pretty uneventful until they run our luggage through the scanner.  Marilyn’s backpack gets pulled for a hand inspection – and then the cute little beagle drug-sniffing dog alerts on her backpack and it gets examined again!.  Then we walk ten or fifteen minutes to the domestic terminal to catch our flight from Auckland to Christchurch.  That means going through security again, complete with removing our laptops, but not our shoes!  

Not to be left out, my backpack gets unpacked and placed in three different trays to be scanned separately.  I guess there is going to be more and more of this foolishness.

Anyway, we finally make it to Christchurch , collect our luggage after playing luggage lotto (‘cause you never really know if your bags will arrive or not!) and call the rental-car company to come pick us up.  After standing outside (did I mention it’s winter here?) for half an hour, Marilyn goes to call again.  “Oh!  He must have missed you!”  Are you kidding me?  He arrives within five minutes of the call and when we check in the young woman upgrades us for the inconvenience!  We’ve got a bright blue Hundai Tuscon!  It will be much more stable on the twising, narrow roads, especially if there’s snow!

We set off for the Antarctic Adventure and actually get to see real live little blue penguins!  So adorable!  And there is a 4D movie about the Antarctic, complete with water sprays and falling snow and a bird that poops on us!  It’s terrific!! We also get to experience an Antarctic snow storm with temperatures that go down to zero!   

But back to the penguins!  We get to learn all about the birds there, which have all been rescued and have some sort of disability and we get to watch them being fed!  Several are so disabled that they have to be fed by hand, while sitting on the keeper’s lap!  One required her fish to be put half-way down her because she can’t sense them until they are that far down;  Then she can swallow them the rest of the way.  Since the last feeding is at 3:30 and we have seen the rest of the exhibits by 2:00, we decide to check out the gift shop and the café.  We’ll be back in Christchurch at the end of the trip, so this is just a preliminary shopping tour.  The café is for real, though.  Marilyn gets a bagel with chicken and cheese on it, with a salad, and I get a sausage roll, which is really puff pastry surrounding a really dense piece of meat!  And it comes with a salad too. It’s quite a lot of food for ZND 8.50  (for each US dollar we get about 1.27 NZ dollars.

Now it’s time to stop at the grocery for a few necessities, then on to our Rucksacker Packbacker Hostel.  We’re working with two maps, one of which only covers part of the journey, and one which has printing so tiny it doesn’t even look like ants!  There is a lot of backing and forthing, complicated by the whole “drive on the left” thing and roads that don’t quite do what the maps show.  At one point we think our hostel had changed names because we’re looking for 70 Bealey Avenue and there is a hostel between 61 and 71 called Kiwi Backpackers.  Yes – that’s not it!  It’s actually across the street in the next block!  I don’t quite understand the numbering system.  It might have something to do with not having had any sleep since Tuesday morning!!  

Mind your trundler!

The Kiwis think these are yams!

We do, eventually, get checked into our tiny room with the twin beds, one desk and one chair and a radiator that doesn’t seem to work.  But it is cheap and clean and we are ever so grateful to be snuggling up in our beds!  (Please understand  -  really sleep deprived!!)