Hello, welcome to our first blog. Neither of us have ever written a blog before, so this is the first-ever post for both of us. We’re going to try to keep the posts fairly short and sweet, and mainly consisting of pictures – but also anybody who has ever heard Andrew try to tell a story will be aware of how easily he gets distracted by tangents. So apologies in advance.
We have arrived in Auckland and into our AirBnB (relatively) smoothly. Hooray. The journey began with a bizzarely empty 7 hour flight, which featured more flight crew than customers. Despite the empty serenity of the rest of the cabin, we still managed to find ourselves sat directly in front of two toddlers who discovered the best new toy in the world – the foldable seat table.
After a brief stop in Dubai we entered the second, far busier, 16 hour flight. It was fairly gruelling, but there were lots of films. We’ve since discovered that there are Jetlag calculators that tell you the optimal time to sleep on your flight to sync to the new timezones smoothly and effectively. We did not use these. Instead, Andrew opted for a Blitzkreig attack to his circadian rhythm by trying to sleep as little as possible during a 26 hour journey, and then pushing to stay up to as close to night as possible after landing.
We arrived in Auckland deliriously tired, wandered around sleep-drunk to briefly see some of the harbour and the sites. We discovered that we were self-sufficient enough to last approximately 20 minutes in the modern world, before we caved and bought a NZ sim card with data on to help us out with getting around and planning. It had quickly become apparent Frances’ directional ‘nose’ is GPS-like, whereas Andrew’s is not. We went shopping and then headed back to the AirBnB, eventually falling asleep at 21:00ish NZ time – a fairly good effort.
That’s all for now. We are going to explore Auckland over the next few days, and there will probably be another post after we’ve left for the Bay of Islands. If you want to follow that you can put your email into the bit at the bottom of the front page and it’ll let you know whenever we make a new post. We promise it will be less meme-based, mainly because we’ll have taken pictures by then.
P.S. please add songs into the Spotify playlist on the front page for us to listen to on our travels.
There & Back Again 