Technically, this covers a couple of “Day 0s” as it goes from Tuesday to Thursday, though we lost Wednesday somewhere in the middle of the Pacific!
After a fine Uber service to the airport from Jett, we had a smooth checkin, and headed to Landry’s at the airport, where we tried our “Priority Pass” (which we get through a credit card) for the first time at a restaurant, and it covered the whole bill. And it was yummy.
With plenty of time to spare, we made our way to the gate with contented tummies.
It was a pleasantly uneventful four hours to LAX. I watched Barbie (better than expected!) and The Meg 2 (as bad as expected, and I was expecting very bad) and avoided napping. LAX was a spacious airport, and we were soon on our plane for Auckland, and the vibe was starting to change. Right in front of us was a couple with an eight month old baby, which so reminded us of traveling with our’s when little. No photo, as Samuel would accuse me of being weird! However, Santa also made a stop, with the Polynesian vibes!
We left LAX on Tuesday at 9pm, and 13 hours later after a couple of meals, many snoozes, two of the three Lord of the Rings movies (concentrating on the background scenery), we arrived in Auckland at 7am on Thursday. Only a five hour time zone difference from home, but we carelessly lost Wednesday.
Passport control was very quick, though the biosecurity was serious and we wanted to ensure we answered all of the questions correctly. But we had no issues, so next was our transit bus to the domestic terminal, where we all made the most of free massage chairs, after we’d been able to change to an earlier flight but still had time to spare.
It’s like other airports, except it isn’t. We grabbed a sausage roll and a steak pie, and the flight numbers were En Zed (no Zee 😁). Security was more like pre 9-11. Their planes look cool with their silver fern logo.
After a final, uneventful two hour flight to Queenstown and a short taxi ride to The Melbourne Lodge, we had arrived at our destination, 29 hours after we left home having flown for 19 hours. It was great to get into our room, but the mountain was already calling.
However, now was not the time to relax, but to explore Queenstown. As we are heading off to Milford Sound at 8:30 in the morning, we had things to see!
We should have taken the gondola back down, but my jet lagged brain thought it was a good idea to walk down a path…
We quickly found a supermarket, and Gatorade, chocolate, and crisps made a great dinner. Hot showers and comfy beds rounded off a mighty fine first day in New Zealand!
This page is part of our New Zealand trip set of posts.
The Adventures of the Cajunlimeys 
Hi Peter and Janet !Wanted to get advice about creating a blog. Ph
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Hi! I’m afraid your comment got cut off, but I will try to answer your question. I think the answer depends a lot on what you are writing a blog for. Is it mostly text or photos or videos. Are you wanting to sell anything, or make money through advertising. For me, I wanted an online photo-journal that supported better photo integration than Facebook or Instagram. I had tried these platforms and written a couple of “blogs” but they did not do what I wanted. Once you have an idea of the types of thing you want to write, you need to find an organization/website that “hosts” your blog. A starting point for this is to find blogs that you like that are similar to what you write about, and find out which hosting service they use. For instance, I use WordPress.com. Another popular option is Wix. I tried wix but it was very slow with photographs. WordPress has issues too but I found it better. Very many internet sites use WordPress around the world. Choosing your host is a very important decision as it’s difficult to change once you have content. It might be worth trying two or three. Which you choose can also depend on your tech-savviness. A Google search suggested “instablogger” but I don’t know anything about them. Note that there is a wordpress.org as well as wordpress.com, and other “WP” sites. While these are all related, I’d suggest sticking with wordpress.com to start. If you choose wordpress.com, it has lots of documentation and a good starting point is https://wordpress.com/support/five-step-blog-setup/. You should be able to set everything up for free, and their free version might satisfy your needs forever. I pay $67 a year for (1) extra storage for more photos and (2) to have my own website address cajunlimeys.com; otherwise, it would be cajunlimeys.wordpress.com. I confess that there was a learning curve at first as I learnt how it works. There are youtube videos that explain how to start and those are valuable to watch, or to have someone you know to step you through the initial setup steps.
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