Live the Live ™

From 7AM on Saturday morning on January 8th  (Queenstown, NZ time) to 3AM Sunday morning January 9th Eastern time (the time we stepped through the front door of our home), we had traveled 37 hours.

Ava was incredible through the whole thing. She has been the perfect travel companion, and even people on the plane commented on how well-behaved she was. Really made everything a lot easier for Kelly and me.

Our special wine suitcases have once again proven themselves worthy. With the two wine suitcases, we also stashed a bunch of bottles into our luggage, and brought home a total of 29 bottles! (We took 30 with us…one bottle valiantly gave its life so that the others could survive. It made a bit of a mess, but the wine suitcases are easy to clean!) We also brought home some souvenirs, olive oil, wonderful New Zealand flaked salt, and the random Nautilus shell.

But despite the fact that we’re home, there’s still some stuff to post here.

If you’re curious, check in once in a while as we post more photos. I will also try some video now that we have a home computer at our disposal.

And there are still a few thoughts about our trip that are bouncing around this big ol’ empty head of mine…including the rafting trip from hell, which several friends have asked to read about. I’m still tweaking it…for whatever reason, I seem to remember more details about it as the days go by. Sounds strange, I know.

Some of this repeats previous blogs…oops…

The plane that’s supposed to take us home is delayed in Washington DC due to equipment issues. So our 6-hour layover has become more like a 10-hour layover. Hoping it won’t be any longer. Meanwhile, it’s supposed to snow in Boston. Bummah.

Our day started many hours ago. We did get an easy, uneventful flight out of Queenstown on Air New Zealand, arriving in Auckland about 90 minutes later. Our crappy little rental car served us well, and we clocked about 2000 miles on this trip!

We had a couple of hours in Auckland, but we had to move our massive luggage from Air New Zealand to Qantas, and to the inertnational flights terminal, which was not a short walk away if you’re pushing a stroller and 2 carts filled to the brim with luggage! But we managed, thanks in part to a woman that just walked up to us and offered to help us push our stuff along to the terminal.

The Qantas agent that booked our tickets to LA saw we were struggling with luggage, too, and came out to help us. We’ve found that everyone in New Zealand has been really nice and helpful…and genuinely curious about why we chose their country for such a big vacation.

Our luggage was grossly overweight…every bag weighed too much, so there was no way we could move stuff from one bag to another to balance it all. But I think it was Ava’s (and Kelly’s) sweet smile that made them look the other way, and no one charged us for the extra weight! This, despite the fact we have about 30 wine bottles packed for the trip home! (Of course, they didn’t know that!)

So here we are at the Qantas desk, checking in for our flight to Los Angeles, and the agent tells us we’ve been upgraded to first class! Kelly and I stared at each other in disbelief. We did call earlier to request bulkhead seats in coach, but somehow we got first class. It was awesome…the seats were huge and reclines all the way back to you could sleep. Ava, of course, chose to watch cartoons, so here we are at the American Airlines Admirals Club in LA, and she’s snoozing away in the stroller. (Kelly has also found a place somewhere to sleep a few hours as I’m writing this.)

We already had paid to upgrade to first class on the way back to Boston on American, so we’ll have good seats for the 6 hour flight home…and like I said, hopefully, it will take off as expected now at 4:30PM Los Angeles time, getting into Boston at 1AM…hopefully.

I wrote about crayfish, the New Zealand verison of a lobster that is clawless and incredibly expensive, though very tasty. (See previous photos of our visit to Nins Bin in Kaikoura.) We’ve had many different dishes that have featured the famous and delicious New Zealand green-lipped mussels.

But the big Daddy…the one that had north and south islands arguing over who has the best version, is whitebait. Simply, whitebait is a very small, thin fish that they catch with nets, like a small smelt. A Kiwi favorite is to take those fish (whole) and mix them with egg and make what they call a fritter…cook it up and serve it on white bread like a sandwich. Whitebait sandwiches are available everywhere in New Zealand, and we’ve had our share of them. But I have to say the sandwich is a sandwich wherever you eat it. Nobody makes one that is any different or better than anyone else.

But then…we finally had whitebait that was simply lightly battered and deep fried…a little salt…maybe a little lemon. THIS was really good! We had it as part of our dinner at Amisfield on our last night. That’s the photo you saw on the previous page. Very tasty and the way whitebait should be served everywhere!