New Zealand 2018 - Part 5

October 6, 2018 - Saturday

We will be staying at the Crown Plaza Hotel again tonight so we are using this day as a laundry day. After the laundry was finished we took a walk down Queen Street through the shopping district.

The district has every designer shop that you can imagine. The one that stood out the most was the Gucci shop. There was a line out the door and up the sidewalk to the next block.  We continued down Queen Street to the harbor and walked around. Before we walked back to the hotel we made a reservation for tomorrow to take a ferry to Devonport and to take a van tour around the Island.  We ate dinner in the hotel bar and met a group from the USA that had just started their trip. As always it was fun to play “Who do you know in what city?”, with new acquaintances.

  October 7, 2018 –Sunday - Auckland

To start the day we had the buffet breakfast at the hotel. We then walked down Queen Street to take the ferry to Devonport www.visitdevonport.co.nz and our tour around the island. The Victorian village was established in the 1840s. The village center is lined with restaurants and shops including a chocolate shop. Our tour guide gave us a running commentary of the history of the town and the architecture. The town is built on a spiral road system that climbs the volcanic cone that is the island.  The architecture goes from Victorian to ultra-modern. We went to North Head to view the beautiful Auckland harbor. The area also has old abandon army tunnels to explore and a grassy hill that children use for “box sledding”.

 We returned to Auckland in the late afternoon in time to pick up our luggage and move to the Kiwi International Hotel where we were scheduled for our first meeting with our G Adventures www.gadventures.com  Tour group. Our tour was booked through our host agency, GoldRush Getaways. Michael and I as independent travel consultants can now book your adventures. A little bit about GAdventures as described so well by them. “G Adventures has defined (and redefined) small group travel for 25 years. Traveling with us is the very best way to get up close and personal with your planet in a way you’d never manage on your own. And when you travel with us, you support local communities and help make the world a little bit better for everyone. Welcome to a World of Good.”  Our tour team members and our Team Leader, Dianne (Di) Dobbs (CEO – Chief Experience Officer) met at 6:30 pm to get to know each other and to go over the itinerary and “rules” of the road. Our team has 12 members, four from the USA, six from the UK and two from Germany. We are 8 women and 4 men, ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-seventies. We are a very interesting mix. I will write more on that later. After the meeting, Di suggested we walk to a locally owned French restaurant for dinner.

***Michael and I joined Goldrush Getaways Travel Agency, as independent travel consultants, in May of 2017. We have been low key until now (January 2019), testing the waters with domestic travel and taking many classes. This is the third big trip for us and each has been a total success!!! We are now ready to actively help others with their travel needs. Contact us at 410-929-1732 or mytravelinglady@gmail.com