Janice and Alan's Trip to New Zealand - Part 1

A big hello everyone back in Canada from New Zealand!

Janice and I left Calgary late Wednesday morning. It took quite a while to make it through US customs and then our flight (Air Canada) was a bit late departing but not by too much. Once we landed in Los Angeles we picked up a rental car and then drove to Santa Monica Pier, as we had an approximately 9 hour wait before our connecting flight departed for New Zealand.

On our way to the beach we passed by a Franks Donuts shop that looked just like the one in the movie Iron Man 2. Either that is the one actually used or it is a local chain and they used another store. For those of you that have seen the movie Robert Downey Junior’s character, Tony Stark, is shown sitting within this large donut display sitting on top of the store eating a donut!

The beach in the Santa Monica area is incredible! It is a wide swath of soft sand that stretches for miles north and south. In case you were not aware the Santa Monica Pier is the western end of the famous Route 66. We walked around there for a while then walked up to the 4th Street Promenade where we browsed for a while and then had a bite to eat before driving back to the airport. The promenade had a number of sculptures of various dinosaurs that also were fountains. Kind of neat!

Not too long before boarding began for our flight to Auckland we got a pleasant surprise! Turns out they were oversold for the Economy seats but undersold for Business class. Because of my frequent flier status with American Airlines we were selected to be bumped up to Business class thus freeing up a couple of economy seats for others. Janice was especially pleased as she has never flown Business class before and I must tell you, for international flights they sure treat you well besides providing a roomier seat that makes into a bed! And in addition they gave us cotton pajamas with the Qantas kangaroo logo on them!

We made it to Auckland without any problems. As usual I didn’t sleep much being able to only get in short cat naps. I spent most of the time watching movies on the supplied video system. I must admit there are gaps in my memory of many of the movies as I had nodded off. It took quite a while to get through customs. Once we cleared customs we called and arranged to be picked up and taken over to get our rental car, a white Nissan “Sunny”. In New Zealand they commonly buy second hand cars directly from Japan as the Japanese law is such that after 5 years maintaining a car becomes prohibitively expensive. As a result many of the models have Japan-only model names, such as this one. In Canada I believe this one would have been called a Sentra.

While at the rental agency I also picked up the tourist radio I had booked when I had booked the car. It uses GPS technology to make sure it gives local tourist information using a satellite radio. So far it has worked pretty good and I am really glad I got it.

Well that is enough for now. I will post an update really soon describing our first few days here in New Zealand.