Our first full day in New Zealand was beautiful, sunny and very windy! In the late afternoon of the day of our arrival we walked a few blocks in lashing rain to a small retail area nearby. We were pretty soaked when we arrived at a great little Indian restaurant and enjoyed a wonderful meal of curried lamb, the first of lots of lamb dishes we’re looking forward to! The second day we had much better weather and we walked the opposite direction to the little center of the community of Mangere Bridge.

We passed the Mangere Mountain walkway to the summit, part of which is behind this beautiful palm tree view. We also saw our first wildlife, a bird strutting along the busy road.

It looks like some sort of heron or egret.

Interspersed between more modern town houses and mid-century houses are some very ‘colonial’ style houses. Some are renovated like this one, some are run down and we saw one in the middle of renovations.

Everywhere there is evidence that it is springtime here! We stopped at a little bakery and bought meat pies, mine a steak & mushroom pie, Robert’s a bacon & egg pie. We enjoyed lunch on a park bench in a cute little park surrounded by some blooming bushes.

It got windier on our walk back, then started raining so we ended up having dinner delivered to our motel room from the Indian restaurant down the street!

After 2 years of planning and having world and personal events cause us to cancel those plans, we finally were able to fulfill our bucket list of traveling to New Zealand! Our plane tickets took us from Redmond/Bend airport to Seattle, then to San Francisco where we finally boarded our Fiji Airways flight to Nadi, Fiji on our way to Auckland!

As we watched the lights of San Francisco fade into the darkness of the Pacific on our long flight, we sat back and relaxed, enjoying a glass (or two) of champagne!

We were able to lay down on our seats that reclined flat, with comfy bedding and light turbulence that rocked us to sleep. We woke sometime in the night to watch our route on the screen as we crossed the equator and the international date line almost simultaneously! The area where we crossed between the red line that marks the dateline was the entirety of our Wednesday, Sept. 27!

A few hours later we woke again to see (on the screen again, since we did not have window seats) the sunrise as we approached Nadi, Fiji in the early morning of Thurs. Sept. 28!

Our best view of Fiji!

After a few hours in Fiji, spent in the lounge since we were not able to leave the airport since we were only transiting the country, we boarded our last plane for the 4 hour flight to Auckland. We arrived in a rain storm and moved with the crowds through the airport and under the elaborately carved archway into our “home country” for the next 6 months!

Stay tuned for more of our adventures in New Zealand!