Esquires

I hate the Astor hotel. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

I hope we never stay there ever again. Ever.

Flight was fairly normal, the 3 hour plane ride actually ended up being a mere 2 hours which is quite a relief. The guy sitting down the row from me turned out to be a huge jerk and got in an argument with the woman behind him- but not terribly important.

Auckland greeted me with open arms in the form of pouring rain. Wind and rain. However, I have to say that it was far warmer than I had anticipated. I hitched the airbus to the hostel, which ended up being right behind the bus stop that I was dropped off at: a fact that I realized only after pulling my map out along with my rain jacket and looking like a total mess. Luckily Annie had just gotten in from walking around the city and was waiting for me to get there.

We went and got sushi which is EVERYWHERE here and probably much cheaper than eating just about anything else. We also managed to find the local countdown (grocery) and killed a lot of time wandering around the aisles in search of food ideas for the next week. Tired and ready for some serious internet, we hunted down an “Esquires” coffee shop which provides FREE wifi with a drink purchase. Luckily the server heard our accents and gave us serious discounts since he used to live in Seattle. Probably the first time that I’ve been treated well for being American.

After checking the tides we quickly came to the realization that Cathedral Cove is a no-go for tomorrow. Rain, tides, lightening, basically everything sucky is tomorrow. Fabulous.

Discouraged, we looked over the itinerary that I had been obsessing over before the Australia trip… and then we completely switched it all. We’re going to tour it backwards from the original plan. Hopefully the drive times will be the same, if not less, but that was probably the most intense hour: we only had a limited amount of internet available to us and we were in a race to get it finished with enough time to actually sleep tonight.

I hope I didn’t bring the bed bugs along. Hoping and praying. I just will stop sleeping. Or live in a garbage bag. Forever.