We started off our adventure with high spirits, excitement and enthusiasm. Adam Metz successfully shuttled us to the airport at 10:30am on Monday, December 12 (Happy Birthday to me!!!!) Our flight to Chicago was on time and the trip had officially begun. However, in Chicago is where our problems began. Due to a broken lavatory on our plane, we ended up being delayed for 4 hours, which would cause us to miss our connecting flight from San Francisco to Auckland. No worries, we’ll just get our flight changed and everything will be alright. Or, so we thought...
The woman at the gate told us that we would have to go Sydney/Wellington/Nelson (adding significant flight time to our journey) or we’d be stuck in San Francisco for a few days. Feeling like we had no other option, we went with it. By the time we got to San Francisco, we had already missed our flight to Sydney, so they rebooked us on the San Francisco/Auckland/Nelson route and put us up for a night in a hotel.
United Airlines put us up in what could best be described as a sub-optimal hotel. It was a Comfort Inn & Suites in South San Francisco. It was under construction and was an outside room entrance hotel, which means they did not offer adjoining rooms. A lack of adjoining rooms meant that Megan had to sleep in one room with Noah while I took up residence in the other room with Cameron. But, at least they gave us $15 per person in food vouchers (to last us for 24 hours) that were only good at the airport. 
We had to check out of our room at 11am, so we headed off to the airport. The Air New Zealand ticketing counter didn’t open until 3:30pm, so we had some time to kill before we could get our boarding passes to get through security. When we got to the ticketing counter, we discovered that United hadn’t booked us on the December 13 flight to Auckland, but rather had rebooked us on our original December 12 flight. So, we had to get reticketed again. When they tried to reticket us for the December 14 morning flight from Auckland to Nelson, they determined it was full, so we were going to be looking at a 12 hour layover in Auckland. Oh well, we could again see the end in sight.
When we got to Auckland, we searched out an Air New Zealand ticket counter and asked if there was any way we could get to Nelson earlier. They were very helpful and rerouted us through Wellington in the hopes that we could catch an earlier flight from there. The issue with getting to Nelson wouldn’t be as much finding an earlier flight as finding ANY flight that could get to Nelson. That’s right, to add to our adventure, they were having once-in-a-hundred-year floods and many of the flights into Nelson had been cancelled.
Our first New Zealand dessert a Raspberry Lamington.
The plane that would FINALLY deliver us to Nelson.
Finally, on Thursday, December 14 at 3pm local time, we arrived safely in Nelson. The hug from Aunty Pam that greeted us was long overdue. It was great to see a familiar face.
Side note: Our luggage arrived a mere 40 hours later after being routed through Sydney.
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