Welcome to New Zealand!

These posts are just as much for me to remember all the details of our trip as they are to share with everyone, so, if you can get your way through them all there are eight different posts from our trip! This one is a collection of pictures from our first day.
There are several videos on these posts, to hear them,

you'll have to pause the music playlist on the right.

If you want to look at all the pictures, the slideshow is at the bottom of the page..

Right when we stepped outside of the Auckland airport, the warm humid air hit us with an incredibly strong smell of honey. I couldn't believe how sweet the air smelled. We were so excited to be there and so relieved to get off our plane, it was 13 hours straight from L.A.

For our first day, we checked into our hotel and then were shown around the city by a guide who had been hired by Sam's company

Here's some of what we saw.

The City of Auckland

They were celebrating the Chinese New Year, these pictures were from inside the Space-Needle Looking structure, we stopped in to convert our cash to the local currency and this is what was going on inside.

The Northern Island of NZ was formed in large part by Volcanoes, this is the view from a hilltop where you can see several "cones" or old volcano tops, this is one of them.

This was the view from one of the streets we were driving down, it was a residential area.

We stopped into a little shopping district and walked around some, I was so impressed with how well they keep up their buildings, it seemed like every building had a fresh coat of paint. You would even see shop keepers out doing touch ups on what looked to be a perfectly painted store front.


I was so impressed with this, when we were walking we stumbled up onto a little birthday party, all the kids were inside an art studio getting to paint and the party was set up outside the shop in the little courtyard. Too cute!
For Dinner our first night we went down to the wharf to find some good seafood, the boats and views were incredible! I think one of the things I was most excited about was eating all the wonderful food that I didn't have to cook!

View inside the restaurant looking out from our table.

Some other fun things were that they drive on the other side of the road, so when you're walking on the sidewalk, our first instinct is to move to the right when someone's walking towards you. I can't count how many times I did that and stepped right in front of someone, they're expecting you to move left, like traffic. It was funny. The people there also had a good sense of humor and quick comebacks, they loved to show their national pride and take a jab at Australians any chance they could get. We are so thankful that we have had this amazing experience!