Welcome to New Zealand

We arrived just as the sun was coming up in NZ and the view from the plane was spectacular. We had wonderful flights, and Qantas really spoiled us, even in the cheap seats. Plane was pretty full with 310 passengers. We had a good dinner, then took our "dr. dave's" (aka our sleeping pills) and tried to get some sleep. Jon did pretty well, I watched a movie, then another, than dozed and then watched another movie. We arrived on time and they were so nice in customs to us, then we caught the city bus into Auckland and walked onto the ferry terminal with 8 minutes to spare for the ferry to Waiheke Island. The weather was spectacular. About 65 at 8:30 am! We found our rental on the island and the lady who owns it was so nice to have it nearly ready for us at 9am. We decided to walk into town and got hopelessly lost. Kept asking for directions, but our 20 minute walk turned into 2 hrs. We got rather sunburned too! I think we logged about 7 miles, up and down the hills, so the exercise felt good. Waiheke is beautiful and the saying in town is "Far enough behind to be ahead." It is so true! We met darling Lisa Glen (daughter for dear friend Pegi) on Wednesday. She rode the ferry over from AKD to spend the day with the old folks. She is so fun, sweet and she has such an infectious laugh that we had a great time. We toured a couple of wineries and tasted about 14 wines, then bought some and took them back to our house and enjoyed a wine, cheese and bread dinner on our deck. Wednesday brought buckets of rain and alot of wind. We stayed in and spent the day reading. Thursday brought still more buckets of rain and we traveled back into AKD and picked up our rental car at the ferry dock. The rental agent escorted us out of AKD to the highway and we are now in "Northland" and on our way to Whangeri (the Wh is pronounced "fa"). Jon is doing an excellent job of driving on the wrong side of the road!
Good bye for now all. Jon is wanting to get going! Missing everyone at home.
Jon and Joyce