Flight over to Nelson ..

We flew Air New Zealand from San Francisco to Auckland. Its a pretty convenient flight for children since it leaves at 7:15 pm. We fed the kids at home and got to the airport fairly early and had 90 minutes to kill before the flight. Maya and PJ were having a great time walking on the escalator, so we did that for a fair amount of time figuring this would tire them out etc (our regular tactics which works quite well for all kids!).

Maya is quite comfortable stepping on and off escalators, but this was the first extended escalator visit for PJ. Was quite interesting to see a normally confident, do first - think later PJ, hesitate and wanting to hold hands as she stepped on and off the escalator. By the time the flight boarded, the kids were quite tired and ready to sleep.

In the past year, AirNZ has added video terminals on all seats. The kids also got a fairly useful kids treat bag (stickers, crayons, coloring paper) that kept them occupied for the next few hours. They then crashed pretty much for the rest of the flight. I managed to catch up on some movies and watched Water and WordPlay. The food was quite awful, luckily we did not have to eat most of it :) (we had some excellent sushi from yum-yum fish and dim-sum from good-luck for dinner at home)

Immigration, Custom and the transfer to the local flight was quite uneventful. Its amazing how much work it is to push 8 bags through the various procedures. Obviously NZ biosecurity wanted to check out the spices and our camping gear. They've become quite efficient at this and were out of the international area fairly quickly. Immigration has a seperate line for families with kids under 5, which helped quite a bit.

The flight to nelson was on a small 40 seater SAAB place and took approx 90 minutes. We took a super shuttle (since it had a big trailer to haul our 6 bags and 2 car seats) to our cute little cottage in nelson. Our hostess Deirdre is quite helpful and very nice. We settled in and went exploring

lobo