May 3, 2009
OK. First of all, in real time it's May 1. But as it happens, when you travel from North Carolina to arguably the furthest place on the planet from North Carolina, you loose a whole day.
This roll of blog posts are going to have to be quick and to the point. In some cases I may be posting directly from notes. I do this for you dear reader; so that you may experience my joy first hand and without interruption.
So we're staying at the Sky City Grand Hotel in Auckland. We arrived at just about 6 am local time. See if you can get the image in your mind. Twenty extraordinarily travel weary people drag ass into the hotel lobby (Twenty-six hours of straight travel. Seriously). We're not expecting to have rooms right away; the agenda says there will be two rooms to hold luggage and provide a place to freshen-up before we're to go on a Maori Walking Tour (Maori are the native people of New Zealand for the uninitiated). Imagine our surprise when it was announced that all of our rooms were ready and we'd have a whole 2 hours before meeting in the lobby to begin our day!
Not so much as it turns out.
Ram (my roomy) and I were impressed to find a news paper at the door of our hotel room. Pretty thoughtful for guests just arriving, right?
I'm guessing you're seeing the foreshadow here... I open the door and roll on in ready to dump my bags on the bed, but boy the bed's seem kind of lumpy. No joke, there were people sleeping in the room. And these folks must have tied one on because they didn't eve wake up!
Turns out, Keri & Cheryl weren't so lucky. As Cheryl illuminates for us, "I walked in and saw a naked lady looking at me in the mirror! She says 'Hello??' and all I can say is, 'Oh, so sorry ma'am!" Needless to say they bowed out of the room gracefully.
Others had interesting tales to tell as well. One happened in upon someone just in the shower. How did he know? They yelled as much when they realized someone had just walked into her hotel room.
As it turns out most of the rooms for the group were occupied. I can't make this up. It's too priceless.
Right, so after relocating to the gym showers to shave and freshen up, we got a little breakfast and headed down to the lobby to leave for the tour. Oh, and in the lobby we ran into Wayne Brady. Really - here's the evidence
And no Wayne Brady, I didn't shoot the winning goal, but can you blame me for leaning on our National Championship fame to explain where we're from? Really? OK, so maybe I was a little over the top, but dude! You're Wayne Brady!
The walking tour was awesome. But the next thing was legendary.
I'm not sure who decided to book a ride on the America's Cup yacht Estrella Damn, but damn! It was not awesome. Um...what's the thing that's more awesome than awesome? That's what it was. One highlight: our staff trip leader Patricia didn't go in the water. However as Ryan, another of the group, steered the boat to better than 45 degrees to the horizon, the water came to Patricia. Capt'n said that was the wet side!
We ended the day sitting on the top balcony of a restaurant overlooking the harbor. There was the luke-warm afternoon sun shining down on us, keeping us as meek as lazy lions after a kill feast. There were two pitchers of Monteits beer, nearly tapped, on the table, with a third on the way.
I'm not sayin' this is the best beer i've ever had, but at this time, after this day, and at this place, I'm sayin' it's as high on the list as any I can remember.
Off to enjoy some good food & good friends. More pictures to come when it won't cost me my first born to upload them to the server.
G'night mates.
Sid.