The Long Flight - Or We Made it to Auckland 12-10-09

Anyone who has ever traveled a great distance in a jetliner will likely tell you the hardest part is when you actually arrive. If you’re one of those folks who has a hard time sleeping on planes (as I do) it can be even harder to adjust to the change of environment or time difference. Thankfully, I seemed to do better this time around. Tasha however needed a little more time. Fortunately the flight out was really nothing more than long and mind numbingly boring.

We arrived in downtown Auckland around 9am local time on Thursday, the 10th. Of course the hotel I booked didn’t have any rooms available until (what turned out to be) noon. So we killed the time by getting some breakfast in a little café. While we were sitting there waiting for our food we could hear a Scottish Bag Pipe band working their way up the street toward the café. Well it turned out the Bag Pipe procession was leading a group of freshly graduated seniors from a local school. Finally, students and bag pipers all converged in the middle of a three way intersection holding up cars, trucks, and buses for what may have been 10 minutes or so. Finally they started to disperse with some of the some of the parents, friends, and freshly graduated seniors spilling into the café to celebrate with cold beer or “bubbly.” (It’s 10 am in the morning but who cares? We’ve just graduated high school!! I like these people!) Why do I tell you all this? Well, even though it has been a long time since Tasha and I graduated high school we couldn’t help but feel slighted that our graduation processions paled by comparison.

Tomorrow during the day we are thinking of taking an Auckland Harbor cruise to see what the city looks like from the water. Tomorrow night we are planning on celebrating my birthday, Tasha’s birthday, and our 17th wedding anniversary with a nice dinner at a restaurant recommended by a friend of Joanne Weir’s. Yes that Joanne Weir (Weir on Cooking, PBS). I’m not going to tell the story, you’ll have to get it out of Tasha, she was sitting next to her after all.

That’s all for now folks.