Day 1 in New Zealand: Jet Lagged in Auckland

I don't know if it was the anxiety-ridden mess that I am or the Girl Scout that I also am, but I felt like this vacation required an "In Case We All Die" set of instructions for my younger kid.

And what WAS my younger kid supposed to do if we all died?

Call my calmest mom friend, of course! 

Stay in college, no matter what.

Keep our family home so she has a home base that isn't a relative's or friend's house.

Ask one of my other mom friends, or one of my other other mom friends, to adopt Luna.

Ask her best friend who loves cats as much as she does to foster Jones and Spots while she's at school, and then she can get them back on holidays.

It occurs to me only now that we're back home that what I probably should have actually been telling her is how to get into the bank accounts and where to find all our important documents, but let's be honest--I barely know all that info, myself. It takes all the combined mental powers of both my partner and I to remember every semester how to get into the kids' 529 accounts to pay their tuition, much less how to log into our insurance stuff. 

Actually, do I even have life insurance? I'm pretty sure I don't. Bury me as cheaply as possible, Kids!

Mental note that organizing our finances into something reasonably discernible should probably be one of my spring projects...

Second mental note that I still need to pay the older kid's spring tuition!

ANYWAY, with all the important "in case of death" decisions made, my nook loaded with books, and my phone loaded with music and podcasts, my partner and I stepped onto the big plane in Houston--

--and then he immediately fell sound asleep and left me to my own bored devices for the next 14 hours. Here's a selfie that I accidentally took about 6 hours in while I was trying to plug in my earbuds:

And here's evidence that it's actually kind of boring outside when you're smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, although I don't know what else I expected it to look like:

I got a LOT of TV watching done, which is pretty great. I watched Our Flag Means Death, which I've been VERY excited to see since it was TikTok famous back in the day--well, shit, Amazon says that there are two seasons, so I guess what I mean is I watched the FIRST season of Our Flag Means Death and I'm still looking for the second season, sigh. And Quiet on Set, whose claim to fame is that my partner woke up, looked over, saw me watching a scene of a kind of graphic retelling of a child assault, was all, "WHAT are you watching?!?", and then fell back asleep as peacefully as a lamb. And then I was stoked to see that they had the new Walking Dead spinoff, but it turned out to basically be a copy of The Last of Us, so I wasn't sad when we landed and I had to abandon it.

I LOVE airplane TV!

I don't travel internationally very often, but Customs in Greece was really nice that time I was there, Customs in England was really nice that time I was there, and Customs in New Zealand was really nice, too! Mind you, they did have a ton of signage about how they were going to charge you 400 bucks if you accidentally brought fruit or honey or dirty hiking boots into the country and it made me really paranoid that what if I HAD actually put a honey bear and a Granny Smith into my backpack and then forgot I had, but I hadn't, and everyone was pleasant.

It makes me think that maybe USA Customs and TSA are so mean all the time because it's part of the ambience? Like, you know how there are those novelty restaurants where the gimmick is that the waitstaff is super mean to you and that's part of the fun? Is that part of the fun of visiting America, knowing that the Customs person is going to act like you're trafficking antiquities and the TSA person is going to scream at you for having/not having your bag of liquids outside your carry-on?

Whatever. Time to pick up the rental car and hit up my all-time favorite tourist destination: the local grocery store!

Check. Out. This VEGEMITE DISPLAY!!!

I'm probably constantly starved for B vitamins or something, because I LOVE Vegemite. My favorite breakfast is a piece of toast spread with a thin layer of Vegemite, with half an avocado squashed on top, and a liberal shake of Everything but the Bagel seasoning covering it. It is SO good.

My partner was not impressed that I insisted on buying the giant jar of Vegemite as a souvenir, but dude. They do NOT sell GIANT JARS OF VEGEMITE in the States!

You know what's even better than a wall of Vegemite, though?!?

Duuuuuuude.

Specifically this:

DUUUUUUUDE!!!!!!!

Do you remember last year's Great British Love Affair with Cadbury with Popping Jellies!?!? I honestly never thought I'd see it again! I thought it was a limited edition! 

The fried chicken chips were disappointing--

--but the Whittaker's chocolate was fucking AMAZING. Probably better than Cadbury, if we're being honest, but if we're being really honest, I pretty much spent my time in New Zealand with a Whittaker's Hokey Pokey in one hand and a Cadbury with Popping Jellies in the other.

It was still pretty early in the morning by the time we finished our grocery run, so we took our breakfast with us on the 45-minute drive west of Auckland to Piha Beach:

And we ate in the comfy car while it finished sleeting outside!

After that, though, it was actually pretty decent--not actively spitting down freezing rain, but just windy and dramatically cloudy--so we happily spent the morning stretching our legs in the fresh air:

We didn't see any penguins... but we did see several dogs:

It's not a national park, so thus marks the beginning of the rock collection that will disconcert this year's TSA!

The day brightened up considerably on our drive back into Auckland, so much so that we had actual blue skies at the waterfront:

And since by then I'd been in the country a whole seven hours without stepping foot in a single museum, you know I was starting to sweat! Better get into the New Zealand Maritime Museum before my brain starts rejecting itself!

If you don't have a favorite type of map, you should think hard about that topic until you DO have a favorite type of map. As I've often monologued, my personal favorite type of map is the Marshall Islands stick chart:

I thought this shark fishing rattle was pretty cool:

You'll be as disappointed as I was to learn, however, that New Zealand STILL fishes shark, and in fact it's often the fish in their fish and chips. Combine that with the fact that cattle are ruining the local watersheds, and that I don't love lamb, and I pretty much lived on eggs, flat whites, and chocolate.

This was new information, and very interesting!

It's the last habitable place to be settled by humans, and yet it's not as out of the way, I wouldn't think, as someplace like Hawaii is. And there are so many islands there in the South Pacific--my kid sailed to Vanuatu, Fiji, and Tuvalu before she sailed to New Zealand, and it just blows my mind to think how tiny they are in comparison and yet they were settled first. 

Reddit has some more context, but I don't think anyone has a definitive explanation.

The museum also had some interesting artifacts about European immigration to New Zealand. In particular, check out my other old friend, the clay pipes!!! Last year on the Thames, I mudlarked some bits and pieces very similar to these beauties:

Books are also my friends:

This was pretty cool--that little whaleboat was built in New Bedford. I was just IN New Bedford!

I found one of these knot-tying displays in every museum I could muscle myself into in New Zealand, and I am OBSESSED with them. I want to learn ALL the knots now!

The monkey's fist is thus far my favorite knot:

This exhibit on Customs in New Zealand cracked us up, although in retrospect we might have just been hysterical from the long travel, because it's not *that* funny to find an exhibit on Customs 10 hours after going through Customs, ahem...

Anyway, look! It's bootleg DVDs that got seized by Customs!

I guess you're also not allowed to import your own pre-built genuine Scottish whiskey distillery? Looking at it was like being back halfway across the world, going on a distillery tour in Kentucky and learning about the owner's ancestor's once-booming Prohibition-era moonshine business.

Not shown is the New Zealand Emirates Team America's Cup yacht because it was just too stinking big, but now I know a weird amount about yachting and I feel a shocking amount of mom guilt that I did not put my children through an organized progression of children's yachting classes, including letting them compete in P-class yacht races. 

Just... it's a whole life of yachting opportunities, just gone. Even if the kids started now, they'd never be able to truly compete with people who'd been yachting since they were children. So weird and fascinating how geography guides one's life in all these ways you'd never even think about.

After absorbing SO much maritime information, I ate the first of MANY meals of eggs--

--we wandered the oceanfront, trying to guess where the kid's ship would be docked in just a couple of days and enjoying the ambiance--

--and then put ourselves through the living hell of driving through Newmarket to get to our hotel with the narrowest parking lot with no visibility down a one-way street so if you chickened out of making the turn since you couldn't see what might be coming at you, you were punished by then having to make a 20-minute series of right turns taking you THROUGH FUCKING NEWMARKET AGAIN and I swear to god the next time we did not even care what might be coming at us, we were NOT doing that again.

On to a hot shower, a grocery store within walking distance, and a 7pm bedtime!

Tomorrow, we go see Bilbo!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!