Adam and I had this bet that the whole month of January we would see who could go the longest, him without drinking Mountain Dew, and I without eating sweets until our trip arrived. We both made it. So the morning we left Kay, Adam's BOA came, and brought Adam a Mountain Dew, and me a sugar cookie from Swig. We were quite happy about it. The funny thing was our whole trip there was no Mountain Dew anywhere. None in the airports, and hardly any in the stores in NZ. When we finally did find some in NZ it tasted horribly different than the Mtn Dew in the US, so it was a major let down. Poor guy. I on the other hand enjoyed many tasty sweets in NZ. :)
Waiting in the St George airport taking pictures we promised Ollie we would take of the planes and from the planes.
We got in a bit of a pickle when we got to the SLC airport. Our flight that was supposed to take us to San Fransisco and then to NZ, was delayed four hours, this would make us miss our flight to NZ. So we started trying to get it all worked out. Delta was such a joke. The lady left us waiting and forgot about us multiple times. She kept telling us we needed to spend the night there in SLC or in San Fran. We didn't want to miss a day of our trip, we had things all planned out as to what we were planning to do in NZ. We finally called Merritts that does all of EJ's travel arrangements, and they worked it all out for us. They had us catch a United flight to LAX and then catch a slightly later flight to NZ. We worried about our luggage getting to where it needed to be, and we tried to have the Delta lady in SLC work it out, and she was about as helpful as before. Our luggage got lost. :( It's gotta happen all the time with flights being rearranged, but it was super inconvenient.
Our Air New Zealand plane that had a Smaug dragon on it.
Waiting to finally get on our flight to NZ.
It was super amazing the stuff the plane had on it. Maybe it's been too long since we flown internationally, but we were impressed. Ha! It had a huge selection of movies, and all our flight progress info. It had games you could play, and order food and drinks all you wanted. Adam was stoked to find out that he could order Milo hot chocolate. The food wasn't that great, but we did have two meals each way. Since we got thrown on another flight we ended up with seats right by the bathroom. We didn't get much sleep at all. It's hard enough to sleep on the plane, let alone with people constantly standing by you to get in the bathroom. And letting the door slam on their way out.
As soon as we got there we had to wait in the longest lines to try and figure out where our luggage was, and they had no idea. Then through customs with a huge plane of Koreans making it feel like we weren't in NZ at all. We found out we needed to stop at the store and buy some essentials. Tim Tams included. We bought deodorant and other such things we figured we would need. Even though when we got to hotel we realized we didn't have a lot of things we still needed. Like a comb.... Ha! We luckily found one in Adam's bag.
While we shopped we stopped at a bakery and got meat pies. It was must on our to-do list. Adam wanted them as often as he could get them. I thought they were good and liked them, but not as much as he did. When done before we headed to our hotel we went to one of Adam's mission areas by Mangere Bridge and drove around seeing some of the sights from his mission. We saw where he had lived, the church he was at, the hill he had hiked multiple times, etc. I loved it.
We went to church to see if we could go to one of the old wards that he served in. When we first got there the Newain ward was in there and Adam ran into a few people that recognized them. Their sacrament was already over and we didn't want to go to classes in another language by ourselves. So we decided to hang out for a bit until the next ward. We drove to a park and I took a power nap in the car cause I was dying. When we went back to the ward Adam got up and bore his testimony and mentioned he had served there. Afterwards we had quite a few people come up and tell him they recognized him and made some connections, except they remembered him being more round in the face. Ha! We had one of the families offer to have us over and feed us, but we a EJ dinner that we were supposed to go to. He didn't see anyone he really wanted to see, but fun to make some connections.
Meeting and seeing all these people was so fun, so we made sure that we got a hold of this one couple that he still had managed to stay in contact with through Facebook and see if we could see them.
Taking some pics like ones from his mission.
We didn't take hardly any pics of our hotel, which we regret cause it was nice and fancy. We filmed some, but no pics. We liked most things about it. We didn't like that they had limited wifi, cause we had planned to FaceTime with the kids a lot. That didn't happen and it was frustrating. They also charged a ton for parking. Everywhere we charged for parking, but the hotel costed a ton. We luckily figured out a cheaper option. We also had to insert our room key in the elevator every time we went up to our room. It was extra security which is nice, but super odd for us to have to do.
We went to the Jones welcome dinner. They had a performance before we went to our dinner. A Haka and some other songs Adam knew. Then we got to socialize with Jones people, which isn't bad but isn't as good as just going to dinner with my Hubs.
No comments:
Post a Comment