We left for the airport on Sunday morning for our flight to Auckland at 11:45. Going through security and customs is an absolute breeze here, even when you’re flying international. We flew on an airline called Aerolineas Argentinas which was questionable at best. The good news was we got breakfast on the flight. The bad news was that apparently Aerolineas Argentinas only serves food in some combination of ham and eggs. This time it was a quiche like dish which smelled and tasted like a foot. Unfortunately I was starving and ate it anyway (and some of Becca’s…I was REALLY hungry, okay?) The flight lasted a little more than 3 hours, and with the time difference not in our favor, we made it to Auckland around 5. We took a shuttle to our hotel (which was SUPER nice, thank you Mrs. James) and got dinner at the hotel restaurant which was DELISH! After dinner we were going to walk around but didn’t get done until like 10, so we decided to just go to bed so that we could get up early and explore the city in the morning.
On Monday morning we walked over to the sky tower (highest building in the southern hemisphere) and picked up tickets for a “tour of Auckland” bus. The tour took us down to the harbour first, so we got off and walked around a little, did some window shopping and most exciting, found a DUNKIN DONUTS! As it turns out, America is not the only country that runs on Dunkins. We made our way back to the harbour and got back on the bus for the last hour it was running. It took us to the top of this hill that had amazing views and we stayed up there for about a half hour until the bus came back. Then we got back on the bus and went around more of the city before getting dropped back off at the sky tower around 4. Monday night we just hung out in the hotel because we were getting up early to go sky diving on Tuesday and didn’t want to be up too late.
Tuesday we got up early, psyched to go sky diving. We got down to the lobby at 9 and waited for the sky diving van to come pick us up but after waiting for about 15 minutes, the receptionist came over and told me the company was on the phone and they told me that the pilot was sick and we weren’t going to be able to go until Wednesday. We had planned on picking up on rental car Wednesday morning, but since sky diving got moved, we decided to get it Tuesday instead and took a cab to the airport to pick it up. We then drove to Mt.Eden, which is New Zealand’s most famous volcano which looked NOTHING like what I thought a volcano would look like, but it was still very cool. Then we drove to a beach called Piha which has black sand and was probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The sun came out right as we got there and it was just gorgeous. Tuesday night we just hung out in the hotel again. I started getting a sore throat on Sunday which just got worse throughout the week. By that night I had a pretty high fever and felt terrible, so I went to bed early. I woke up at 4am, still had a fever, still felt terrible and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to go sky diving in the morning.
BUT when I woke up at 8 on Wednesday I was feeling better and we got in the sky diving van at 9. It was about an hour drive to the site and I got more and more nervous the closer we got. When we got there we found out that the four of us (Becca, Lauren, Emily and I) would have to jump by ourselves and not as a group like we had thought. This made the idea of jumping out of a plane at 12,000 feet A LOT less appealing. Lauren was the only one who still wanted to do it at this point, but we all sucked it up and went. I ended up going last and was only supposed to go up to 9,000 feet, but the pilot kept going and I ended up jumped out at 13,000…absolutely insane! It was crazy, exhilarating, exhausting, scary, freezing, I thought I was going to die, glad I did it once, never want to do it again, have a HILARIOUS video which documents the whole thing. The whole ordeal took about 6 hours and we got back to Auckland around 4 and went up to the roof pool/hot tub and just hung out for the night. The city itself was pretty dead because all the kids studying there were on Easter break, so we never got to really experience the night life there, but I love being in hotels, so that was fine with me :)
here are some links to facebook pictures of the first few days:
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