After leaving beautiful Queenstown (though of course it was raining in the morning, but it didn’t stop us from hoofing it into town to check out the Saturday craft market), returning the rental car, we flew up to Auckland. What a change…a big city, over a million people and instead of looking at Lake Wakatipu from our hotel room we got to look at this.

And since it was still New Zealand, it was raining! However, we managed to find the main street, do some sight seeing and shopping and find the wharf.

The wharf was not too exciting, so we went back up Queens’ Street, found a nice pub for dinner and planned our itinerary for Sunday…work out, shop, and Auckland Museum in the Domain (large park) there. We hit the internet cafe after dinner.

The gym was nice and uncrowded, after we found it on the 7th floor of an obscure building. The Museum was nice and it turns out there’s a “grass” court tennis club (looked like Astroturf to us) right next to it.

New Zealand was a terrific country to visit. Christchurch is in all our thoughts, it will take years for the city to recover from the earthquake,but it will recover.

Happy to be back in the USA though!