Well we survived 30+ hours of travel! In the end it wasn't nearly as bad as we prepared ourselves for, but it is hard to mentally prepare for a 12 hour flight, especially when you that right after you have a 13 hour flight and 3.5 hour flight to follow. The first 12 hour flight from Boston to Dubai was smooth. Emirates Airlines is so much better than any U.S. airline, we had tons of new movies and tv shows to entertain ourselves with, Andy and Anthony even tried out the video games, playing each other in trivia. We slept a little on that flight and landed in Dubai at 8am their time, 10:00pm our time. We were tired, stiff, and not sure what the next 13 hour flight would do to us. We had almost a two hour layover in Dubai so we were able to walk around, we saw Arabic writing and special prayer rooms, got some Starbucks and recovered for our next leg. The second plane was huge, full double decker plane. We were in row 49, we thought we would be in the back of the plane but instead found ourselves just 9 rows from the front of the plane. This plane also had the nicest, most spateous plane bathroom we had ever seen! We sat on the Tarmac for over an hour waiting will they cleaned up a sink overflow, once it was clean we were on our way. Taking off from the Dubai airport was pretty awesome, we flew right over the city and had some crazy views of the buildings. Andy and I fell asleep pretty quickly on this flight, I think we slept for close to 9 hours of it! We arrived in Melbourne feeling pretty good, which surprised us as we had prepared for the worst! I don't think Anthony and Kendra felt as refreshed as us, but we were all in pretty good shape. We arrived in Melbourne on Monday morning, we had to get off the plane for the hour while they cleaned. We returned to the same seats and had our third breakfast of the trip, and enjoyed our 3.5 hour final flight to Auckland.
Once we landed in Auckland, we got through customs with only a minor scare. Andy got pulled into the bio hazard area because of our camping gear that he had in his bag. After a quick check to make sure it was clean, we all were out with no major issues.
We had some difficulty trying to figure out how to get to the rental place, I guess we sort of assumed that since we were in an English speaking country we would be able to read the signs and figure it out, not so much. Once we asked, we were given directions and got on the right bus that brought us to Britz where we would pick up our camper van. The van is awesome, it is spacious and comfortable and totally doable for the 10 days we will be driving around!
After about an hour at the rental place we were ready to hit the road, we punched in our hostel into the GPS and traffic was crazy to get there so we decided to stay by the airport and stock up before heading towards the city of Auckland. I drove the first shift since I was the only person who had driven on the other side of the road before, and with some helpful reminders from Kendra, we were able to navigate the roundabouts, traffic lights and detours to get us to the store. After a successful stock up on lunch stuff, drinks and snacks, we piled back into the van to head to the hostel. Thankfully it only took us about 25 min after traffic - and only one minor parking incident where we took out a few branches with our open roof window- we had officially made it.
Andy, Anthony, and Kendra took quick showers and headed down to get some food at a local burger joint. They enjoyed some tasty burgers and local beers/ciders. Andy couldn't help but notice how far we had traveled to go somewhere where the people look just like us -
We left Saturday morning from Boston, it is now Monday night and we are finally going to bed!
No comments:
Post a Comment