AUCKLAND, NZ

AUCKLAND, NZ

Our flight to New Zealand was about 13 hours of flying in the dark. Sitting in those hard seats for that long is not fun! I wanted a sleeping berth but I guess those cost extra! My video screen was so dark I couldn't see the movies. Already dreading the trip back! Hours of dozing off and waking up. Bathroom trips from drinking lots of water. Disturbed, bumped and jolted by sleepy passengers frying to make their way to the bathroom, enabled the sleeplessness problem. But I can't complain about the Economy Airfare we got for $1200, when we had seen those fares earlier climb to over $3200/ea. I'm sure th sleeping berths would have been over $4500/ea.

We landed in Auckland a out an hour late. A lot of people missed their connecting flights, but not us! We were scheduled to catch our flight to ROTORUA at 12:30, which we did!

Customs was easy enough. We had brought foodstuff for snacks and cooking in our condo and had to declare it on the provided customs declaration form, or face a $400 fine for trying to sneak in contraband food! The customs Official looked over our list and wanted to see some of them. He confiscated a pound of dry Pinto Beans that we had earmarked for a batch of homemade chili. The remaining stuff was okay.

We took our luggage over to the Domestic Flights area and checked it on to Rotorua. We boarded our small plane a couple of hours later. Our small commuter was a twin Prop that would seat 20 souls on board. About 7 seats were empty. There was a single seat on each side of the aisle. It looked very strange after the wide bodied plane we came to Auckland!

We scoped out the tiny airport and then made our way outside to bargain with a few Taxi's. we picked one and headed to the Worldmark Resort, Checked in and found our 3-bedroom condo. It's not as nice as the American condos, but......

"It'll do, Pig....It'll do."