Day 1: The Energizer Bunnies

We managed to get to JFK and through security at Terminal 1 without much delay at all. However the coordination between Northwest and Air France does not appear to extend to the internet checking in or seat selection so we were unable to choose our seats or check in from home and thus had to sit separately on the flight. This turned out to be a blessing for Kirsten but alas, not for me.

I was excited once we got to the gate area and saw that we were to fly on Air France’s newest and only Airbus A380, perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s enormous, and dwarfed the Alitalia 747 parked next to it. It has all the newest bells and whistles and can hold many more people on its two full length passenger decks. It required two jet bridges in JFK, one for the top level and one for the bottom, however when we disembarked at Charles De Gaulle they used four.

The flight ended up being a little delayed due to high winds in New York but once we were up in the air the going was fine. I didn’t do so well with my seat though as the tv screen on the seatback in front of me was out for the first half of the flight and while I was trying to sleep for the second half I couldn’t because of the people behind me couldn’t figure out the remote control on the TV and were using the touchscreen function violently. I think I got fifteen or thirty minutes of good sleep when the guy finally decided on a program to watch. There was also a lady in that row who was constantly getting up to go to the bathroom and was using my headrest as a handlebar to swing herself out into the aisle. She must have ate something that disagreed with her. She also brought a little dog in a carrier that she had at her feet and must have fed whatever disagreed with her to her dog as well as there were a few moments of nasty smells coming from that direction.

On a more positive note, the food was great and plentiful. Steak and potatoes with a chicken and couscous salad along with cake, pudding, French bread, cheese, and wine for dinner and yogurt and a muffin for breakfast before we landed. I also watched the movie Up and liked how well the dogs were animated. I also watched the Simpsons (in French!) as we were making our approach into Paris.

We disembarked in Terminal 2E but collected our bags and went through customs in the middle portion of Terminal 2C/D. It’s a beautiful airport and the customs people were very fast and efficient. It is a bit on the big size though, seeming a little out of scale for humans but that may be because we were coming from the undersized Terminal 1 at JFK. We had to walk quite a ways to get to the train to take into the city.

The subway system is a bit labyrinthine but the trains run so often you don’t usually have to wait long. Very different from New York where it’s easy to get around in the stations and make transfers but it can be a long time between trains.
Anyhow, we’re staying in the Montorgueil area which is near the Louvre and just north of Les Halles. It’s classic Paris with cobblestone streets lined with stores and restaurants. The streets are very narrow and there are so many people that the cars don’t really bother coming through, mostly motorscooters. We checked into our apartment on Rue Dussoubs. It’s a very quaint studio with a balcony looking onto the central courtyard. No TV and no bathtub but we do have a gas stove and oven as well as a bidet which I will learn how to use and then tell you all how that went in lurid detail.

We met up with our friends, Tim and Becca, and Tim’s brother, Tony at a little pizza joint down the street from us called Bianco. Delicious thin crust pizza that could teach the New York places a few lessons in how to make a good pizza! I got on with sausage and egg and Kirsten got a bowl of four cheese pasta that was excellent. Later that night we walked over to the Opera Garnier (the Phantom of the Opera one) but the line deterred us from going in. From there we walked over to the Galleries de Lafayette which is a Macy’s like department store with an amazing stained glass dome over the central atrium. We spent some time here browsing around before Tim and Tony headed off to do a wine tasting. Kirsten, Becca, and I ambled down to the Tuileries and took cover under a tented café when it began to rain. We shared a couple of crepes and then ventured out to walk around the Louvre .

We ended up down in the Carrousel (an underground space under the central Louvre plaza) and wound up getting McDonalds for dinner. I know, I know, bad tourists are we, but we were fading out fast from jet lag and such. Anyhow, we both had a Royale with Cheese. Better talk to Vincent and Jules of Pulp Fiction about that one – preferably not with a gun in your hand though or you might have to go see The Wolf.

We met up with Tim and Tony, and Becca’s cousin Suzie back in the courtyard of the Louvre before deciding that given the length of the line to get into the Louvre even at that hour we wouldn’t make it so we jumped on the metro and went over to the Eiffel Tower to see it at night. Fantastic! Pictures don’t do it justice as there is so much ornamental ironwork on that beauty that you just can’t capture it all. I especially liked the beacons that rotate at the top, they reminded me of the lighthouses back home along the shores of Lake Michigan.

We waited until nine because every hour thousands of strobes all over the tower go off for about five minutes and it shimmers and sparkles and looks really amazing. Once the sparkling was done we jumped back on the train, headed back to the apartment, and within fifteen minutes were passed out. We ended up sleeping for thirteen hours.

Day 0: Life By the TSA Clock

Annnnnnnnd we're back.  It's 10:35 in the AM and you're reading Kirsten and Kyle's Blog.  If you're just tuning in we are preparing ourselves for a quickie visit to Paris for New Year's Eve and a long weekend with a group of friends from Detroit.  Most of them are already there and we're just going to be fashionably late to the party.

I've still got a laundry list of items left to do on my list so this will be a short entry.  I still need to finish packing my liquids per the TSA requirements and figuring out how many coats I want to bring.  I also should probably look into how we're getting from the airport to our apartment in the Montorgueil area.  We're meeting our friends at Stohrer (the oldest Patisserie in Paris) at 12:30 tomorrow afternoon which is a bit surreal to think about sitting at my desk in my apartment here in Brooklyn.

So seeing as the TSA is now telling us to get to the airport three hours ahead of time for international flights and it takes us approximately two hours to get out to JFK from our apartment we need to leave by 1 to catch an 8 o'clock flight.  Gotta hustle!

See you all in Paris!

Day 17: Auckland briefly, jumbo jet longly

We have returned to our native soil now. Currently I am drinking some tea, taking some sleepy vitamins and steeling myself for my return to work in the morning. Everything about the return was pretty uneventful. It was a long flight from Auckland to LA but not as long as LA to Melbourne was. Neither one of us got much sleep so a lot of movies were watched on the in flight monitors. I think I watched Angels and Demons, Adventureland, and something else but I don’t recall what. I may have been awake but I doubt I was coherent. Customs in LA was a breeze. I guess the trick is to declare anything that you possibly can and then the customs agents won’t feel the need to invade you. We also had pretty good train karma coming back from the airport with only one snafu at the Lawrence St. station which was closed for the weekend. Fortunately that only ended up being a two block detour to the 2,3 train that took us to Atlantic.

Auckland this morning – way way way back this morning was surprisingly nice. Most people say they find it bland and I suppose it was, but it was bland in a rather comforting way. We didn’t see much, just puttered around in Wendell through the downtown area and then up to Mt. Eden for a view of the city. Mt. Eden is actually a dormant or extinct volcano, I don’t recall at this point, but you can drive to the top and they have a nice path walking around the rim. No going down into the crater though as they had signs warning against it saying that the ecosystem was very fragile. We obeyed but it would have been cool to go stand at the bottom of a volcano crater.

From the rim of Mt. Eden you can see a 360 degree panorama of Auckland and it’s obvious that the area was once a hotbed of tectonic activity. You can see the volcanic cones rising all over the place. We counted at least ten but the guidebooks say there are many more. It was a very interesting landscape and much different than the general mountainous-ness of Wellington and the rest of what we saw of New Zealand.

From here we drove to Auckland airport, dropped off Wendell the rental, and got situated for our long flight. Thus concludes our honeymoon. We had an awesome time, had so much fun, and made so many great memories. It was fun to write up these entries each night and we hope you all enjoyed reading along. Until next time. . . .

Day 16: The last day

Today was all about the driving. We stopped at a few spots along the way to stretch our legs and exercise the camera. In order of appearance:

Craters of the moon is a volcanic thermal field that was somewhat active until the 1950s when a nearby geothermal energy plant went online and lowered the underground reservoir and thus it became less violent and geyser-y and more steamy and bubbly. It made sense when I read the informational signs but now that I’m typing it out the logic kind of defies me. It had something to do with the lowered water levels in the reservoir that changed the pressure coming out of the fumaroles and other such vents. It was pretty cool though. There were all these craters and rifts in the ground that had steam billowing out and boiling mud at the bottom. All the plant life was green at the tips but had a charred appearance otherwise. It was very weird that plant life could live in such an environment with the heat and the soil that was loaded with phosphorous and sulfur. (see the full set of photos here.)

We drove a little further and came upon a sign advertising another thermal field so we pulled off and drove down a dirt road for awhile before we came to some campground with alpacas, chickens, peafowl, and a sheep running around. We decided that feeding the random chickens and peafowl the remnants of our French bread from last night would be more fun than seeing another thermal field. Yep, you can tell we’re city folk, we live in an inhospitable environment but chickens are something new!

From there we proceeded up the road to the tourist city of Rotorua which you can smell before you actually enter. It is also in a volcanic region and the smell of sulfur hangs over the town. Our guidebooks indicated that the overseas tourists typically stayed in Rotorua which stank and was pretty tacky with the tourist trap clutter while the Kiwi tourists stayed in Taupo which had beautiful vistas and was generally a little sleepier. Unfortunately the weather made short work of those vistas as it continued to rain all day. We tried.

Anyway we stopped for lunch in Rotorua eating at The Fat Dog. Their menu seemed limited so I ordered the burger which ended up being ridiculously big and vertically unstable. It had two beef patties, lettuce, bacon, mayo, carrots, cole slaw, a fried egg, and string beets per the tradition down here. I would like to report that they’re onto something down here, beets on a burger is actually really good. I can’t really describe it and I admit that I don’t like beets, but trust me, it works. Kirsten got a disappointing chicken fettucine thing that really ended up being chicken noodle soup. After lunch we walked around town a bit and found a little ice cream shop. Even though it was raining and cold we got some more hokey pokey ice cream because it was worth it. I also picked up a bottle of RC Cola (I know, exciting right!?) that was strangely bitter. As we tried other sodas in New Zealand it became apparent that the Kiwis don’t seem to like them overly sweet as most of them had quite a bite to them, including the Coca Cola.

We then drove up to the North Coast and a little town called Waihi Beach which was very pretty and cold. There were also hundreds of shells washed up so we picked up a good collection while we minded the giant sand fleas that were everywhere.

Our final stop before it got dark was a nice little waterfall along the highway that had a turnoff and shortly beyond that there was a very impressive canyon through which the highway wound its way along the bottom. In fact we hadn’t planned to stop but once we passed the water fall and went through the canyon we decided to turn around and go see them again this time from a speed of zero miles per hour.

From there we drove straight into Auckland where the fearless mountain goat drivers suddenly turned into timid lambs on the multilane freeway and drove SO SLOW. We stayed in a high rise hotel on the north shore that ended up being one of the nicest hotels of the honeymoon. It was a huge suite on the 13th floor overlooking the ocean with an all glass balcony, a full kitchen with a dishwasher and laundry facilities, and a pool up on the roof of the low rise portion of the facility that we enjoyed that night after a nice lamb dinner from a restaurant up the road called Aubergine. Too bad we were only here one night as it could have been a nice little base to check out Auckland.

Tomorrow we have a couple hours to spare to check things out but not enough time to jump off the sky tower. They have one of those freestanding observation towers here where you pay about $20 and go up and enjoy an amazing view and attached to it they have something called the Sky Jump which looks pretty cool. You’re harnessed in to a cable system and jump off a diving board on the roof. You glide rappelling style down the cables and come to a controlled stop at street level. The videos all show the happy passengers landing square on their feet on a platform above the sidewalk. Looks awesome! I’m told that Las Vegas is to get a similar system sometime in the next few years so perhaps I’ll get my chance whenever I get over there again.

Anyway, for now – goodnight!

Day 15: Riding Wendell from Napier to Taupo

It’s morning again and these days are going by so fast. It seemed like it was just the other day that we were in Mission Beach and were finally over our jet lag. Now we have just two more nights before we return to reality. Alas.

The breakfast part of the B & B was very good. The owner, Ruth, fixed up some nice kiwi (fruit this time), croissants, muesli, and other vegetarian fare for Kirsten and I along with the other two guests, a nice older gay couple from Palm Springs. Bizarrely, once we all found out we were Americans we couldn’t help but talk about the politics of our country. I’m sure our host was either bored out of her mind or perturbed at our sensibilities. Oh well, it was a delicious breakfast and a wonderful diversion to the endless hotel rooms. This was also the first time either of us had stayed in a bed and breakfast and we both liked it. It seemed like we were staying with friends rather than at a hotel and I suppose that’s the appeal.

The morning was spent nosing about downtown Napier in the daylight. We wanted to go to this town because after an earthquake leveled the place back in the 1930s they rebuilt everything in the art deco style. The guidebooks all tout it as the next best thing to Miami Beach if not better. The art deco is very nice but it’s much more subtle than the flashy buildings and neon of Miami Beach. At first I thought it was far inferior but as I began to notice all the little details, I changed my mind. It’s definitely an excellent collection of art deco architecture but to compare it to Miami Beach isn’t really fair to either city. It was more like the art deco you would find in the American west than the stuff you find on the coasts.

After a bit of lunch in a sidewalk café we took off in the newly renamed Wendell the Rental car toward the resort town of Taupo. This involved more mountain driving, this time over the Ahimanawa Range, which was not as beautiful or twisty and extreme as yesterday’s drive. We did stop alongside the road to see some waterfalls though that were quite spectacular if not a little far off. Once we got over the range it began to rain and never really let up all day so we couldn’t really enjoy the views across Lake Taupo today but hopefully tomorrow will be clear.

We spent our rainy day perusing the Taupo museum which had some very impressive Maori carvings and models of World War II planes. I pointed out the planes that my Grandfathers were involved with to Kirsten who smiled and nodded. They also had a very long wooden canoe that was half finished before it was abandoned for several centuries and even survived forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Needless to say it was pretty beat up but with a little patchwork it could probably be taken out for a jaunt on the lake.

After a wrong turn at one of the roundabouts we ended up going down a road to Huka falls which we decided to see rather than turning around. The falls were impressive in that they were like a horizontal Niagara Falls. It was a very large volume of water being forced into a very long and narrow chute. It didn’t descend far but the chute was probably an eighth of a mile long. It was an impressive display of turbulent hydraulics.

Our final stops for the evening were at a honey store where Kirsten bought two big jugs of honey that we’re hoping the customs officials will let us take home and we tried New Zealands favorite ice cream flavor – Hokey Pokey. It’s a sort of buttery vanilla flavored ice cream with chunks of crunchy caramel in it. It’s similar to pecan pralines but minus the pecans. It’s delicious!

The other stop was the grocery store as the restaurants in town didn’t seem to be too appealing. So we picked up a rotisserie chicken, a bottle of local wine, some bread and cheese, and some breaded yams that we sautéed in our kitchenette. It was a good dinner and now the Jacuzzi awaits.

Note that new photos and movies are up on our Flickr page (more to be added here to the blog later).

Day 14: Over the mountains and through the forests. . . .

We woke up to a beautiful Wellington morning today, so we rolled over and went back to bed. I blame the generous check out time of 11. All the other hotels we’ve stayed at have had checkouts at 10. So given the late morning, compounded with a need to run to the drugstore for some contact solution to get us through New Zealand, we got off to a late start this morning. Not a problem now, but it would prove to be an annoyance later.

After our pharmacy run (back to using the word pharmacy rather than chemist) and a short navigational and “you can do it” pep talk, we made our way through the city to the peak of Mt. Victoria which is sort of smack in the middle and has fantastic views in all directions. You can even see the entire airport and just how much runway the pilots have to contend with. Once you get out of the flat bit around downtown the roads are extremely narrow and are often times just wide enough for one car – yet they’re two lanes. Several times I had to pull part way into a driveway to get out of the way of cars coming the other way. We’re driving a runty model Corolla too, I can’t imagine trying to take Bernie through this town. The views from the top were magnificent once we made it up there and seeing some of the lots people built their houses on were impressive too. Some homes had their own incline railways that had garage door motors attached so they could get from street level up to their front doors. Others just had hand cranks.

After Mt. Victoria we went down and back up to the Wellington Zoo, mainly to see their one-legged kiwi. He got it caught in an opossum trap and had to be amputated. He seems to get around just fine now though. It seems that opossums are a serious pest in New Zealand though. The zookeepers also sternly admonished us to keep our cats indoors and dogs on leashes so they don’t eat the native wildlife which is also a big problem here. The kiwis are nocturnal, flightless birds that are quite endangered and difficult to spot in the wild but after seeing photos of them in our guidebooks, we really wanted to see one. We didn’t see much else in the zoo aside from some more fruit bats. They weren’t as large as the ones we saw in Brisbane but it was fun to get up close to them.

From here we meant to head on out to Napier and the wine regions to do some tasting and we got on the main road that took us around Mt. Victoria and into downtown but unfortunately once we got into downtown the road forked and we were in the wrong lane and ended up going back over Mt. Victoria because there wasn’t any place to turn the car around. Once we got back on that main road we made sure to get in the proper lane. Before we got on the main highway out of Wellington we passed the parliamentary buildings of New Zealand which were pretty cool looking. They call one of them the Beehive. I’m assuming because of the shape and not because the New Zealand politicians are as busy as bees, although they might be!

The two-lane highway up to Napier goes over the Tararua Range in a long stretch of looping, twisting switchbacks up and over. It made for a very exciting beginning to the drive. I was driving at what I thought was a slightly uncomfortable rate but the Kiwis have no fear at all! They were taking those corners like they were driving miatas while on drugs. Even the truck drivers!

I should also note that kiwi refers to New Zealanders, a flightless bird that is a national symbol, and a tasty fruit. Try to keep track as all three will be mentioned at some point.

After leaving the mountains there was little interesting aside from sheep everywhere we looked. The drive also took much longer than we anticipated and we arrived in Napier well past 7:00 and well past closing time for the wineries. That ended up being fine since they seem to take drunk driving very seriously here and we actually went through a checkpoint where they checked my breath. Of course I, being American was expecting to blow into a little tube like they show on the movies and when the police officer holds this machine up to be face I start blowing at it even though there was no tube while the police officer asks me my name and address. Since I was in mid blow I didn’t respond quickly enough and Kirsten starts yelling at me in an inarticulate and panicky sort of way. Startled I turn toward her and shout out my name and the beginning of my address before lowering my voice and turning back to the device the cop was holding in my face which promptly blinked out the verdict of “No Alcohol.” Apparently it can detect it from speech and there is no tube involved. I look up at the cop who was laughing at us and wished us a nice holiday. We thanked him and drove on, but not smoothly as I overcorrected in lining up with the turn and slammed the left front tire into the curb.

Driving on the left eventually got easier and the only problems I was having was maintaining my side of the car on the right side of the lane. Even though I knew I was supposed to be in the left I still wanted to be on the left side of the lane. I gave the rumble strips a work out.

Once we got to Napier and settled in at the Green House Bed & Breakfast, we walked down the hill that the house was located on and into town. Dinner was at a place called Lone Star and seemed to be the best option open for dinner. I had the lamb and Kirsten had some sort of delicious bean dip. We ambled around town a bit more before staggering up the big hill back to the B & B for the night.

Day 13: We’re driving on the wrong side of the road!

Brisbane Airport’s International Terminal is amazing. Lots of light, lots of space, and very comfortable and functional furniture, this is an airport I wouldn’t mind being delayed in for awhile. Our flight today was aboard Air New Zealand which was a nice respite from the no frills Virgin Blue and Jet Star. Even though the flight was only a little over three hours, they still served us breakfast and I’m still kicking myself for not getting a mimosa like all the other women. Don’t judge me, they looked delicious!

Wellington’s airport is ridiculous. It’s a single runway and taxiway between two hills with houses crowded up right next to it. We could see the control tower up on stilts, on one hill, in a neighborhood. Not only is it narrow but it’s also bracketed at both ends of the runway by Wellington Bay. The terminal itself is nice and functional and we breezed right through customs and got our rental car with no problems at all.

Being a passenger on the left side of the car and riding in the left lane is dizzying enough but actually doing the driving is REALLY disorienting! It’s really like learning how to drive all over again. Nothing is where it should be and you have to visualize each turn before you make it. Remember to check your new blind spots, your mirrors are not in the right place and neither is the gear selector or the turn signal. When I went to move out of park I rolled down the window. When I meant to indicate a right turn I turned on the windshield wipers. But eventually we made it to the hotel incident free.

The Mercure hotel is very nice and Kirsten was happy that we have a bathtub here after shower loving Australia (where water conservation is extra important). We went for a long walk around central Wellington which is very compact and manageable. The geography is a lot like Pittsburgh but the architecture is more modern. The harbor seems to be everywhere the hillsides aren’t, and aside from the downtown area there doesn’t seem to be any flat land here. Also, the New Zealand accent is much thicker and I finally feel like I’m in a foreign country.

We also rode the incline cable car up to the botanical garden and walked around up there. We were quite taken with the R2-D2 birds up there that we later learned from a postcard are called Tui. They have a bullfrog like balloon on their throat and they make all sorts of R2-D2 sounds, telephone rings, fax machine beeps and buzzes, laser beam blasts. It was hilarious! There were also a flock of what looked like ducks that were screeching (not quacking) away as they flew by – they turned out to be parrots.

From there we meandered our way back through downtown back to the neighborhood our hotel is located, Brooklyn, and had a pizza at Hell (thanks to a recommendation from our wonderful friend Phaedre). I had the Lust and Kirsten had the Greed. We even had some lust and greed leftover for breakfast tomorrow morning. How devilish.