New Zealand Travel Adventure NZ Days 1 through 3– Getting Acclimated

Even though we were without luggage for the first 40 hours of our time in Nelson, it was still great to get here. The view from Aunty Pam’s living room window is almost indescribable and pictures do NOT do it justice. You can see Tasman Bay and mountains at the same time. The sky is as blue as any you’ve ever seen. Multiple beaches are just up the road. There’s almost no traffic. It’s basically what I would envision heaven looks like.

The first order of business upon arrival was assembling Aunty Pam’s Christmas Tree. The boys did a wonderful job of adding ornaments and tinsel before we called it a night.

The next morning, we headed off to the beach. You have never seen two boys happier than Cameron and Noah were to be at the beach. Cameron probably picked up half the shells on the beach. He found starfish, sand dollars and lots of colourful shells. Noah wanted to do nothing but go swimming, despite the very cold water. By the time it was all over, Noah was down to nothing but a diaper.

Friday evening, the Slinns (Tania, Peter and Jean) came over for a combined birthday celebration. We were celebrating my birthday along with Jean’s. On the menu:

New Zealand lasagna (a little different than what we’re used to, but still pretty good)
Cold chicken (although Cameron asked for his to be heated up)
Carrot Salad
Rice & Kumera Salad
Banana Cake with “lollies” (translation: essentially a cake that looks and tastes like banana bread, with lemon frosting covered in gummy worms and other assorted candies. Basically, the perfect dessert)
Here's the after picture of the cake. You'll note the missing "lollies" as those were the pieces that Noah particularly enjoyed.

Saturday morning, our luggage arrived. Noah and I were still getting acclimated to the time change so Noah took a 10am nap while I have been napping off and on since we got here.

In the afternoon, we headed back to the beach (this time with proper attire). Noah swam until he nearly gave himself hypothermia, and then built his first sand castle. After seeing Cinderella’s castle later while watching Toy Story 2’s opening credits, Noah opined “I build sand castle just like that.” Cameron continued to grow his sea shell collection.
After playing on the beach, we headed to the playground where the boys and I got our first taste of Mr. Whippy. I can definitely say that it won’t be our last Mr. Whippy visit.

New Zealand Travel Adventure Hours 1 through 60– “The Terminal” (in reference to the Tom Hanks movie)

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.