Auckland Day 1

We survived the flight down under. Actually, it was great. We highly recommend Ambien for long flights. We arrived rested and ready to tour the city. We were not however prepared for driving on the "wrong" side of the road. I swear, if our marriage can survive these driving adventures we will be able to weather any storm. It is quite an adventure. The streets are VERY narrow.

After checking into our hotel, our first stop was Sky Tower. Sky Tower is much like the Space Needle. It was completed in 1997 and the observation deck is just over 1000 feet. It gave us a great birds-eye view of the city. Then went to Kelly Tarlton's, an aquarium, on the other side of town. They have a fantastic penguin exhibit and plenty of other interesting exhibits. We got to see sharks and sting rays fed.

Then we took a little driving tour around the southern part of the city. Again, testing our marriage vows. We went to One Tree Hill, a beautiful park that overlooks the city. Yes, for all of you U2 fans, that is where the name of the song came from. Here we got to see some of our first sheep! They were grazing right by the side of the road. It seemed so strange to us to see animals in the middle of the city. We weathered an amazing rain squall on the way up there. There was even flash flooding in the area. Fortunately, it only lasted about 30 minutes, and was over by the time we got to the lookout point so we could get out and take some pictures.

Our next stop was Mount Eden, a charming neighborhood and another fantastic lookout point. It is a volcanic crater just minutes from downtown Auckland. And that's all for today...

Here are just a few of our photos. You can see the tower from our hotel room, notice in first picture that you can see a person jumping from the tower (yeah, that's right, jumping from the tower. Pretty crazy stuff, and he paid about $150 to do it.) There's some penguins at the aquarium, nd then there's Andy hanging out with a new friend. Finally One Tree Hill and then the volcano. Next time you hear from us we will probably be in Rotorua.