In case you are wondering, yes I am back. I know it has been a few days, ok more like a few weeks since I posted anything from my trip. The truth is, I was sick the last part of the trip and did not have much energy. It was enough to get up and get ready and get out the door, much less blog anything. The other issue was our crummy internet. It was slow and dropped the connection a lot while we were online.
The next few days that I blog about are going to be very minimal but at least I came back and told you that I made it home alive and in one piece (even if I did have a double ear infection with one eardrum ruptured).
Dec. 29: We were in Aukland this day with no plans for any excursions. We did have a power jet boat ride planned but when we both came down with whatever it is that we had, we cancelled it because we didn't know how sick we would be in Aukland. I'm glad we cancelled it. We ended up doing a Hop On Hop Off Bus Tour on this day. It gave us a chance to see the highlights of Aukland. We got off at the Sky Tower stop and went up as high as they would let us go. That was a pretty neat experience. The views were great! There were people there that were doing a "sky jump." If I would have felt better, I would have done the jump. It was sorta like a controlled bungee jumping thing. They also had the "sky walk" but since I would be doing the bridge climb in Sydney, I didn't want to spend double the money and do basically the same type of thing. That's about all I remember from Aukland. I remember sleeping a lot on the boat (I think.) My memory has faded but at least I got the highlights.
Dec. 30: This is the day that we woke up to pouring down rain. Thankfully our excursion was at noon so the rain had a chance to let up that day. The seas were so rough too. We weren't docked but anchored down in the middle of the bay area and the ship was really moving. We tendered into the port and got on a catamaran boat and went around and saw different areas in the Bay of Islands. We were supposed to go the "the hole in the rock" but the seas were way too rough for that and I'm so glad they didn't even attempt that because I was getting a little anxious with all the big jumps in the water on our boat. A sweet little lady even got sea sick on the boat. It was rough! The highlight of the catamaran was seeing some dolphins swimming out there. That was fun exciting! When we got back to the dock it was raining again and they started loading people onto the tender boat but then stopped. Apparently one of the motors wasn't working. So they decided to circle around to the other side of the dock and keep loading. I'm not really sure what good that did to keep loading on a boat with a motor out. I think they were having a lot of tender boat issues....not great if there was an emergency on the boat and we needed those boats to keep us safe.
Dec. 31 was a sea day. When I was looking back and my little notes I made so I could remember what we did that day, I found the phrase "lots of food." So I think that must have been the day that we ate a big breakfast and then went to the suite luncheon and had some great indonesian cuisine (so good!) and then we must have eaten a lot for dinner....I'm not sure. I just think it's funny that I made a note about how much food we ate. I also made a note that we went to the spa after dinner. That was pretty much part of our nightly routine. We were planning to stay up late and go to the party in the showroom but we both were so tired and the ship rocked us to sleep. So we were out early. Don't worry though, I celebrated the next afternoon/early evening with NYC and the ball drop in Times Square.
I'll add January 1-5 later. There are a few of those days in there that were travel days. But they are coming soon!
