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| The Auckland Harbor including Sky City in the background. |
| Glenn's Journal 01-02-03 New Zealand We slept in today, not on purpose, ut because we must have needed the extra sleep. After waking up at 9:15 am we hurried around to prepare for the day. We were scheduled to be at Rose's place at 10:30 am so we could transfer journals to the website. Rose has a computer already hooked up with a card reader and a CD burner. We appreciate that she is allowing us to use it. We arrived at 10:45 am with no worries and quickly completed our task. It didn't take us long and we were leaving by 11:15 am to head off towards an internet cafe. We drove along highway 46 on the way back to Ivanhoe hoping to see a "gaming" internet cafe that we had seen the other day but we must have missed it or it was actually closer into town but, either way, we returned to the train station in Ivanhoe and took the train back into town. We exited the train at the Melbourne Central station and returned to the same internet cafe that we had used on Monday. The speed was good and we had gotten a lot of work done. We arrived around noon and spent the next 3 hours working on the website. I linked all of the new journals that we had (I was caught up while Erin was still missing a few weeks from Southern Australia and Tasmania) while Erin worked on photo pages and a new front page for Victoria. We felt pretty good about all we had accomplished this week and promissed ourselves not to get so far behind again. After the internet cafe we stopped across the street at the mall and the food court for lunch. Today we had pasta along with a smoothie. After lunch we quickly made our way back to the train station to return home. We just missed the 3:57 pm train and waited for the 4:09 pm train to Ivanhoe. We made it home around 4:45 pm which left us 15 minutes before Elaine would be here to pick us up and take us to the airport for our 7:30 pm flight to Auckland, New Zealand. We quickly loaded the car with all of the things we were not taking with us and parked the car down the back next to the house. We finished our last minute packing and were just zipping up bags when Elaine arrived. We loaded ourselves into the car and off we were through 5:00 pm "rush" hour traffic on the way to the airport. Traffic was not so bad (probably due to the fact that plenty of folks were still on holiday) and we arrived at the airport at 5:45 pm. Elaine dropped us off and we thanked her as we said our goodbye's (actually see he in 3 weeks). It did not take us long to get through the airport as we were plenty early for our flight. After check-in and security we were sitting at the gate a little after 6:00 pm. I read while Erin "window shopped" through the bookstore. We boarded the plane and were on our way by 7:30 pm. The flight was only 3 1/2 hours and included dinner (beef stroganoff) and a movie. We could not believe it when the movie was announced as "Sweet Home Alabama", the movie we paid to see only two days ago on New Year's Eve. Erin watched it again while I faded in and out of actually watching it again. We arrived right on time into Auckland and with the 2 hour time change it was now 1:00 am. We departed the plane, went through customs, picked up our backpacks, and made our way through immigration before making our way into the main terminal. We did not have a car rental or accomodation set for the night so we stopped into information. The "wall" had plenty of phone numbers for hostels and hotels that were open 24 hours a day. We called a few before finding one that had dorm beds available. We would work the car rental tomorow (or should I say later this morning). We then found a shuttle service into town and after a 40 minute ride into town we found ourselves at "The Fat Camel" hostel. We checked in and "hit the hay" at 3:00 am. We bookd for two nights so we would not have to get up and checkout before 10:00 am this morning. It was a long day and we were both very tired so it didn't take us long to fall asleep. |