26 October 2016

Day 1 Plan - survive the long trip until night time

Climb! Climb! Stay awake!
The trick to getting over jet lag as quick as possible is to stay awake until it is night time in the place you land. We arrived in Auckland at 8:30 am. This meant a long day after a long night with little sleep or "power" naps.
We made it to the hotel and were told the room wouldn't be ready until 2:00pm. So this meant doing a little exploring.
Turing to our Pokemon Go adventure touring map we made some left and right turns and found ourselves at a great playground. Perfect. When you look in search engines or Maps for "Playgrounds Nearby" this one didn't appear.
We sent the children onto all the climbing equipment, then went for a walk along the edge of the cliffs. There were great views of the water!
This place was Kennedy Park in Castor Bay. There were a collection of old WWII gun emplacements with plaques explaining the history of each spot. The photo of the children overlooking the bay is what observers at one of the gun emplacements would have seen - but with the trees trimmed back I suspect.
We finally made it back to the hotel just before 2pm and they let us in. The bags were plonked in the rooms and we had a shower and change of clothes. Now the hard part was staying awake for the evening Mass.
We initially tried to make the 4:30 pm Mass in the Auckland Cathedral but forgot one little thing. We were in a Minivan whose height was about 1.95m. City car parks had height restrictions from 1.8m to 2.0m. So we did a quick lookup and found the local church had Mass at 5pm so off we went, back near the hotel.
Mass was good but Zach fell asleep almost as soon as we sat down. The other children impressively remained awake.
Lots of beachs and cliffs in and around Auckland.
I initially held Zach but quickly passed him over to Peter. Hooray for younger stronger arms and backs.
Zach remained asleep, dead to the world, even through the various sitting, standing and walking times during Mass, moving into and out of the car, plonking onto his bed and tucking him in. The children even tried putting a chip into his mouth. No reaction.
Next morning he awoke with the rest of us and announced, "I couldn't sleep last night because you snored."

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