Day 1: Auckland: mt eden

I arrived in auckland airport at 5 am. Walked out and realized wtf am i gonna do for half a day before getting to the hostel? I wandered the airport,read a bunch of brochures and bought a sim card.

I took the taxi to the hostel at 8 am. Bad idea. It was rush hour. The taxi costed a fortune. Lesson learned. She was a nice samoan lady though.

So its 9 am and the manager said the rooms not ready till 2. I have half a day to kill. I wandered the streets of auckland looking for mcdonalds for free wifi. I got there. Wifi didnt work.

I got back to the hostel to move into my room. Met my roomie for 2 days. She s cool check out the bug skin she picked up! I also went to mt eden which was just a 10 min walk away. Apparently there were a few volcanos here in auckland.

-mike

Flight to Auckland

I was planning to have one more thoughts in transit but I fell asleep and didnt have time to add another lengthy blog. Let me just summarize what happened trying to get here:

On the way to the airport i learned my flight to vancouver at 12 was cancelled. I got to the airport and had to rebook the next flight to vancouver for 2. Unfortunately the plane intended for the 2 o clock flight was switched to a smaller plane so the only option for people with seats higher than 39 was to take the next flight at 6. My seat row was 41... fortunately for me i had to take the 2 o clock or else i would miss my flight to auckland from vancouver. I took the flight got to vancouver and had 1 hour in between to get to the next flight. I got to the boarding area showed my ticket. And they told me i couldnt board because one way tickets werent allowed. I moved aside waited a bit. Double checked my whv papers and showed them the part where it said i could get a one way ticket and they let me through. Clutch!

When booking the flight I tried to get the shortest layover time in vancouver (4 hours) but i realized that it would have been way better if i took the longest layover time to make time for me to get out of the airport and check out vancouver for a bit. Lesson learned.

-mike