Hi all! We are here. Arrived yesterday afternoon – over an hour late but we arrived.<\/p>\n
The flight was long – very long. During most of the flight had no idea what time it was or even what day it was. Knew where we were, could see that on the flight information, but time? So we sat and ate and watched films and ate and dozed and played games and sat and sat and sat.<\/p>\n
I have now officially been to Australia! Hooray. OK, two hours (more or less) in Melbourne airport. Still that’s Australia.<\/p>\n
We went out for our first meal in NZ and had . . . Japanese. Yep. Little place near the hotel which was wonderful.<\/p>\n
Joe’s bit: After a long flight changing in Dubai and Melbourne; yes Kathleen can now not complain that she’s never been to Australia. We arrived in Auckland. Got a shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel. Pretty days and we’re not feeling too bad. Checked in, quick shower and change after over 24 hours in the same clothes. We then wandered around the block and had some nice food and then back to the hotel and crashed out about 7:00!<\/p>\n
This morning’s report: Got up and did the boring getting ready for the day (and Joe will insist on breakfast). Then off to the Sky Tower which is nifty. There’s a glass floor in the lift so you can watch the floor disappear way way way below you. We went right up to the Sky deck and took loads of photos. We are lucky – the weather is sunny and blue sky, barely a cloud to be seen, and even sort of warm. Then made reservations for the restaurant tonight – we’ll go up and watch the sun set then have a nice meal while watching Auckland spin slowly below us. Now we’re off to the harbour area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi all! We are here. Arrived yesterday afternoon – over an hour late but we arrived. The flight was long – very long. During most of the flight had no idea what time it was or even what day it was. Knew where we were, could see that on the flight information, but time? So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4T97-J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":427,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/03\/cape-coast-to-amsterdam\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":0},"title":"Cape Coast to Amsterdam","date":"Friday, 3 September 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"As we were at the bus getting ready to head out to Accra and the airport, one of the delegates strolled up and said his flight left at 1745!\u00a0 So it was a mad drive to the airport and we just got there in time. Check in was chaotic and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4292,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2025\/12\/14\/and-were-off-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":1},"title":"And we’re off again","date":"Sunday, 14 December 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Stayed at Gatwick again as the flight was very very early morning (06:40). We did the twilight bag drop, you can drop your bag between 20:00 and 22:00 if you have a flight before 8:30 which is very helpful. We still had to get up early, but could just go\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2006\/10\/06\/taking-bollocks-to-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":2},"title":"(Taking) Bollocks to America","date":"Friday, 6 October 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"We are human again. Shower, brush teeth and coffee is all it takes. This message brought to you by Kathleen typing and Joe commenting! After about 5 hours of sleep we got up at 3am on Thursday to be ready for our taxi at 4am. They usually show up a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":29,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2006\/10\/10\/down-to-kentucky\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":3},"title":"Down to Kentucky","date":"Tuesday, 10 October 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Right, update. The flight out of Philly was pretty awful. The air conditioner on the plane wasn't working so we sat on the plane for a while, then got off for a while, then back on for a while. In the end we finally took off over 3 hours late.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":410,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2010\/08\/29\/friday-and-saturday\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":4},"title":"Friday and Saturday","date":"Sunday, 29 August 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Up at 5am and away by 6am. Loads of time at Heathrow, eggs on toast but no watches (need a replacement due to broken band). Flight to Amsterdam fine. Enough time in Amsterdam to get to boarding gate, not enough to actually look around. The flight to Ghana was not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Frog Blog"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3988,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/01\/oh-canada\/","url_meta":{"origin":45,"position":5},"title":"Oh Canada!","date":"Saturday, 1 July 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"So stayed at Gatwick airport last night, up early to head into the terminal and to our WestJet flight to Vancouver. I booked the holiday ages ago, but only just realised that tomorrow Canada celebrates it's 150th birthday. So this should be interesting . . .\u00a0 Had breakfast at Jamie's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}