Our last travel day till we go home. Today we'll leave New Zealand and fly to Sydney Australia.
I slept in until 7:30. That's nearly 9 hours of sleep so I must have been tired. But I felt great once I woke up. I worked on the blog for an hour. Yesterday's text was done so I was adding pictures to day 5 and getting it ready to publish. I didn't quite have it ready before we headed to breakfast but it was close.
Breakfast was at the same restaurant and I had the same complaint, solid yolk on an over easy egg. But it still tasted great. I was very full with about 1/3 of the food still on the plate. I left the rest except I forced down the bacon. I think there's a universal law that says you can't leave perfectly good bacon on your plate.
Back at the room I kept working on the blog and Mike actually had some real work for an hour.
With a few hours to kill before our flight and needing to be checked out of the room, we decided to drive back to Arrowtown where we had the fusion dinner the first night here. It was a short drive and we found a parking spot right on main street as we arrived.
It's a fun little town with a good mix of shopping and dining. We looked through all the shops on one side of the road. I found a few more trinkets for grandkids. They had an old style phone box (not a Dr Who police box) so I got a picture in it. Then we walked the other side. It was only a couple hours after that massive breakfast so none of the sweet shops or ice cream sounded good and before we knew it, it was time to head to the airport.
We gassed and returned the diesel SUV then hiked to the airport. It wasn't really a hike but it was a couple hundred yards. Security was still very lax. No identification and no boarding pass was needed to go through. They do still scan luggage and we still walked through the a metal detector, but anyone can do it.
Once we were through security we walked over to the gate and found a seats. There were allot of people despite this being a tiny airport. Not only that, it's a tiny international airport. All of the gates in this area had flights heading to Australia and they were all leaving within 30 minutes of each other.
We were sitting across from an Australian couple. The husband was a big man wearing a rugby jersey and he looked like he'd earned it. His hair was nearly shaved around the sides and long and curly on top. He went to get drinks for he and his wife and when he came back, everyone in the area started call drink orders to him. He laughed and told them all to "piss off". Then he sat down and spilled his beer down his shirt and laughed as hard as everyone else saying "probably 10 dollars worth there". While we sat he made lots of other jokes, many of which I dare not repeat.
We'd eaten breakfast 3 hours ago, had an hour before we left, and a 3 hour flight so I figured I should grab something to eat. I walked around and eventually decided to get a "sausage roll". That's usually a round sausage wrapped in flaky dough. I came back with it and found out it was nearly a rectangular hamburger patty inside flaky dough. It was huge. Using a fork, I took about 8 bites. The meat was nearly tasteless, typical britt sausage. The bread was good but really flaked into nothingness as I tried to bring it to my mouth. I finally said alloud "Well that's enough of that" and the australian guy pointed at my shirt and said "You're worse than me". I was covered in flakes. I stood and brushed it off, then tossed the rest in a bin. I told him "I'm probably going to regret eating that, aren't I" and he said "Hours and hours of regret." Everyone around laughed at it. About then, Mike came back from wherever he'd been and said "Good news, we get fed on this flight" which caused another round of laughter.
After a bit more sitting, we heard our names over the intercom and asked to go to the gate agent. Since we hadn't checked bags, we hadn't shown the airlines our passports and they wanted to see them. Simple enough, but while we were there, another lady came up and asked if we had weighed our carry luggage. We both said no. It turns out that New Zealand has a "health and safety" law limiting overhead bags to 7Kg or 15lbs. Our empty bags are nearly that heavy. Mike's bag was 15Kg (33lbs) and mine was 12Kg (26lbs). So the lady said we would have to check our bags. She took our boarding passes, applied tags to the bags then assured us our bags were safe and she'd see that they got on the plane. Mike looked in shock, he hadn't checked a bag in years. And instead of making us lighter and more able to move around, it meant we had to physically carry backpacks instead of wheel them around on top of the bag.
We'd lost our entertaining seats by the aussies so we found another spot and settled to wait. They boarded 2 flights in neighboring gates at the same time so everyone in the area all got up and pushed and shoved to get through to their gate to board. We were row 11 but boarded early to get out of the crush.
We were in the first of 2 exit rows so we had great leg room but our seats wouldn't recline. We got the speech about helping in an emergency and settled in to a nice flight. I had a window seat but the only thing to see the entire flight was clouds and ocean.
We landed in Sydney and as soon as we walked off the plane we knew we'd left New Zealand. It was 80 degrees and very humid. The muggy feeling wrapped itself around us and I was instantly sweating.
We almost breezed through immigration. We walked up to cameras, scanned our passports and walked in. Then we had a 400 yard walk to the luggage carousel. Then import control took about 1 minute in line and 20 seconds saying that everything on the declaration card was true. It was fast and simple.
We walked over to the taxi queue and hopped in the first one. We've taken several uber rides on this trip and the difference to the taxi was obvious. No greeting, we had to prompt him to turn on the AC, and took off like a rocket. He cut lanes everywhere he could, sped up turn lanes and merged at the last second and would cut across 3 and 4 lanes of traffic with no hesitation. Since there was no way to leave a rating on the ride, he didn't care what we thought of the ride.
We did arrive at our hotel in one peace and he did drive us up to the front door rather than kicking us out in the street but that's about it for courtesy.
The room was nice. We turned the AC down to 19c and basked in the cool for a while.
It was already close to dinner time, so we asked the concierge for recommendations for Thai food. He pointed us down the street a short distance. It took us a bit to find it because we thought it dead ended in a different restaurant but it was just an odd point of view. Once we pushed past that we found the Thai place. We got some crab fried rice, pork belly, and green curry chicken to eat family style. It was really good.
After dinner we walked around the pier as the sun was setting. We had the iconic view of the Sydney Opera house before us and the sun was just setting. We didn't get a specific golden glow or sunlight but the opera house was glowing compared to most of its surrounding adding to the beautiful setting. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was starting to shine compared the the city behind it and we got plenty of pictures of that as well.
We walked all the way to the end of Circle Quay (pronounced Key) then turned around and walked back and around the other way to the opera house. The more end on to the opera house, and the closer we got, the less it looked like the majestic photos. It was still big and nice but that side on view is just so iconic.
We were also poking into shops all along the way. I wasn't hungry or thirsty at all so we didn't get gelato or crepes, but they sure smelled good.
While looking through one souvenir shop Mike spotted a leather outback hat called "The Crusher". It turned out to be almost exactly like the hat I lost on day 2. It looked and felt very similar and cost about the same. I tried different sizes on until I found one that fit well. We'd already planned to go to a hat store tomorrow, but here was what I was looking for. I opted to wait till tomorrow rather than buy it now.
We kept walking until about 9:30 then headed back to the hotel. I worked on the blog a bit but was just too tired and headed to sleep shortly after we arrived.
My steps was 12,000 or 5.74 miles
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