The day had finally come! I successfully moved to Kailua, Hawaii on August 3 and we were set to leave for 2 weeks in New Zealand August 22. This happened to be the day before Hurricane Lane was predicted to hit Oahu so we were very fortunate in the timing and that we were getting about as far out of town as possible.
After taking precautionary hurricane photos of the condition of the house, Andrew & I loaded up the 4Runner and made our way into town (Honolulu) from Kailua for our 9:30AM flight. After seamlessly making our way through security, we met up with Lauren & Ian and Emily & Jason who would be traveling with us. Excited to be dodging the incoming storm, we got out off Honolulu without a problem on Air New Zealand and made our way towards the South Pacific on a 9 hour flight. My flight from Hawaii was about $1000 but the rest of the group purchased tickets on Cyber Monday back in November 2017 for $300-400 roundtrip. What a steal...for them!
Due to crossing the dateline, we landed in Auckland around 4PM on Thursday even though it was a 9 hour flight and we left around 10AM on Wednesday. I tried to figure out all the math but settled on the answer of time travel and science instead. But basically from Hawaii, it is a 22 hour time difference which really means its almost around the same time but just the next day. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who can write a whole paragraph about this...
So we make it to Auckland and remember its cold because its in the Southern Hemisphere where it is currently winter! We clear customs and collect our bags and take an Uber into downtown Auckland to the AirBnB for the evening. Once settled and showered, we head to the streets to a restaurant Emily & Jason previously dined at a few years back and made sure it was a "Must Eat" on this trip as well. The Depot was under the Sky Tower and expectedly had a long wait so we put in our name and head to the Wild Turkey pop up bar next door for some welcome drinks. It was here that we observed two nerdy brothers and one potential call girl put on a rather entertaining show for us curious onlookers. My back was to the spectacle the entire time so I relied on the facial expression and commentary from Lauren and Emily to paint a picture of the scene - which I now sort of regret.
Once our name was called for dinner, we head back to Depot Eatery and Oyster Bar for a rotating table of oysters, lamb ribs, halibut sliders, all of which we continued to put in order after order. The food was amazing. Once finished, and we had basically shut down the restaurant, we said farewell to Ian and Lauren who had a different itinerary than us for some of the trip, and headed home.
Or so I thought.
We attempted to get into an Irish pub for "just one drink" (Side Note: This catch phrase is always a lie. Okay, maybe not always but like 93.7% of the time it's a lie). The bouncer wouldn't accept our state IDs and so I thought I had won the battle. False. The group found some spot on our way home called the BBQ Duck Cafe that served soju which is like a Korean sake type liquor in flavors such as peach, green grape and blueberry. We had all of them along with an order of dumplings which our serve convinced us only came in quantities of 15 (AKA it was late and they wanted to get rid of the 15 dumplings they had prepared in the back). The Ashley Party Pooper timer finally went off and it was time walk home to prepare for another day of travel.
Welcome to New Zealand!
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