The Trip

Hey All!
Well, after a mere 54 hours of travel, I made it to the hostile we stayed in Wellington!
      My trip started in Madison on wednesday morning and started off with a flight to Denver. After a 2 hour layover, I hopped a plane to LA. Once in LA, I only had a 9 hour layover to get through. but it was fine, there were plenty of bars at the airport : ). Getting on the plane, I was surprised to find one of the program members sitting across the aisle from me, what a fun coincidence! The 10.5 hour flight to Fiji went pretty smoothly, except for the jerk in front of me who used their chair like a sledgehammer against my knees. But I was able to make it to Fiji with a couple hours of sleep under my belt.
      The Fijian airport was small, just 1 terminal with only eight gates. but it was probably the cheapest airport ever. If I had been thinking/ known the exchange rate I would've bought some of the shell figurines for $1 US or a hand carved mask for $5 US. But after my 5 hour layover I took off for Auckland. It was a relatively short flight, just under 3 hours. It only took an 1.5 hours or so to go through customs which was nice. Since I only had about 2.5 hours of free time before my bus to wellington so I took a seat at what seemed to be the only authentic New Zealand restaurant at the airport, which was of course a bar. I was able to sample some local beers and chat up some of the kiwis which was really cool.
     To get to the bus station, I had to take a a shuttle 45 minutes into downtown, and still had a 5 block walk to get there. Unfortunately this is where my trip ran into a little bit of a hick-up. At the stop before mine, a car decided to cut in front of the shuttle as we began to pull out and we hit their rear bumper. At this point both drivers got out and started screaming at each other in the street. After about a minute, our driver got back on and calmly told us to get off and that there would be another shuttle in about 20 minutes if we wanted. Unfortunately I didn't have time to wait. So instead of a 5 block walk with about 100 pounds of luggage through a strange city. I now had 10 blocks, and only about 30 minutes before I was supposed to check in. Fortunately it all worked out perfectly, even with the giant 5 block hill I had to climb.
     The bus ride was shorter than expected, only 9 hours instead of 10 which was really nice. Unfortunately it was at night so I wasn't able to see too much, though I did get acquainted with their gas stations(boy do they love their meat and cheese pies!). Anyway I made it to Wellington in time for a jam packed day with the group and fun night downtown. but that'll have to wait until my next post.
    Thanks for reading