Gotta Be Doing Something: Flightless Birds

The Kiwi bird is New Zealand's national bird. It is flightless, almost completely blind and endangered. It is not as majestic as our Bald Eagle. Doug was not a big fan of the choice thus allowing me a glimpse of what we may have felt if Benjamin Franklin had gotten his way and our national bird were the wild turkey.
From the moment our plane landed in New Zealand (NZ) I was in love. After a week in the country I was ready to pack up my life and move down. There are tons of hills and mountains and everything is beautifully green. The roads are narrow and wind through the mountains. It takes forever to drive anywhere because there are no straight roads. Nothing is open late. That was interesting to discover as we traveled and found very few people roaming the streets at night (even on weekends) and most places closed up at 6pm. Time just doesn't travel the same in NZ which is probably why we traveled back in time returning to the United States. (Literally, we left NZ at 7pm and got back to LA at 12pm the same day, saved 7 hours.)
I wish we could have spent more time in NZ. Because we only had 7 days, we only saw the north of the north island. We spent 2 days in Auckland, 2 days in Rotorua, 1 day caving in Waitomo and 2 days in Hamilton (but we stayed in Raglan).

Auckland

For sure the highlights of the trip were caving and the All Blacks game. A friend, Adam, who is currently living in Wellington, NZ recommended going to the glow worm caves. As soon as I heard about it I was sold. We booked a black water rafting adventure. Black water rafting is what they call floating down a river underground. It was amazing. Our guides Andrew and Vash were fun and the rest of our group were cool. In preparation for our adventure we were outfitted into wetsuits. Here is how this went: first we put on our swimming suits, next came a potato sack like sweater to keep us insulated, next booties, then the wetsuit (bib style), then a wetsuit jacket. No, we are not done. Then we had boots, shorts and helmet with headlamp. We even had a cover for our hair so that it didn't get caught in the ropes. Basically everything had some layer except our hands which we would discover we wish we had.
Once we finally got all our gear on and we were trained on the equipment we headed out to the caves. We abseiled (repelled) 120 ft down into the cave. Then hiked through the water further into the cave. A quick zip line in the dark (very freaky because you didn't know where the end was) and we jumped off a 15 ft cliff into our tubes to float around the caves. We finished our trip with a quick visit from our friend the eel and then climbed out a series of 3 waterfalls. Basically it rocked!

Repelling into darkness

Check out our sexy suits

The only thing that came close to it was the All Blacks rugby game. So here is a quick background. One of the reasons for the trip to NZ was my sister Kelly served her mission in NZ. Doug was an elder from my her mission. Doug studied at BYU and has family in Utah so I have hung out with him a few times. So I consider him my friend. Anyway background done. When we were planning our trip I noticed that the All Blacks would be playing, but I couldn't figure out how to get tickets. So I emailed Doug and man did he come through. He was able to get us tickets to the SOLD OUT game. It was awesome. I got all decked out with a jersey, beanie and scarf. The last thing I needed for the game was to understand anything about rugby. Lucky for us Doug's cousins went to the game with us so between Doug and his cousins these 3 Americans figured out what was going on enough to cheer and boo at the right spots.

All geared up...GO ALL BLACKS!

Overall the trip was a huge success. We learned to draw penguins (of course we saw some too), we hiked a volcano (dormant...for now), covered ourselves with mud in a mud bath, hiked where wild pigs could have killed us, ate fried mars bars, saw the tallest Maori carving, drove on the wrong side of the road (no one died and no accidents), saw kiwi birds (even if they couldn't see me), had a brother in the Hamilton temple forget my name after every baptism, ate the most delicious burgers you could imagine (seriously so great), enjoyed a delicious Maori meal and watched the haka up close and personal.