Kristin Laura

Day two started with a buffet breakfast at the hotel.  One of my favorite things about international travel is smoked fish for breakfast.  Today I had smoked fish wrapped in smoked fish with a side of smoked fish.  One was salmon, but I'm not sure about the others.  Looking forward to tomorrow's breakfast (not that this is all about eating, but it kind of is). Michael the concierge recommended a trip to Waiheke Island.  There were lots of tours and tasting packages, but I thought the prices seemed a little steep so we opted for the round-trip (they call it "return") ferry and all day bus pass.  I guarantee we had better wine, food and adventures than the folks on the tours. After a scenic 45-minute ferry ride from Auckland to Waiheke, we jumped on bus #1 and took it to the end of the line at Onetangi Beach.  There were lots of tourists and locals on the bus, but we got a good laugh when a girl questioned the driver about the location of the beach. ...

For a moment, we were wondering if we were going to make it out of LAX.  We asked for directions and ended up outside the terminal and on a a shuttle bus to the international terminal.  I'm not sure if we could have gotten there without going outside, but it was a long way between terminals and ate into our 2.5 hour layover pretty quickly. The Air New Zealand plane was a 777 and we had upgraded our seats to a "sky couch".  That didn't work out as hoped, but it gave us all 3 seats in the row so that was good.  The conceptual drawing showed the footrest flipping out into a bed that two can sleep on.  So picture the width of a normal 3-seat airplane aisle.  Now picture Shawn and me lounging in that space...yeah, that didn't happen.  But, all in all, for a 12-hour flight it wasn't terrible. Air New Zealand in Auckland First view of New Zealand Shawn bravely tackled driving on the left side of the road.  It was even more of an adventu...