We got home just after 1:00am Saturday morning but it took an hour to get the house back to normal (turn everything on). We had turned off the water heaters so we had no hot water for showers, the thermostats had been left at 65 deg so it was chilly, etc.
The flight from Auckland to San Francisco was only 11 hours due to a strong tail wind. That is three hours quicker than San Francisco to Sydney was going out. We had longer layovers this trip so it still took about 24 hours of travel time to get back. We had to get up early to get off the ship and then took a four hour tour of Auckland before going to the airport so it was really a 32 hour day.
We flew Air New Zealand and it was an extremely pleasant flight. The flight crew were unusually friendly, the seats were very comfortable (even in Economy where we were), the food was excellent, the movie selection was vast, the flight information available on the individual video screens was the best I have seen. No wonder Air NZ is just about the top rated airline in the world. To be fair to United and other U.S. airlines, I have to also mention that Air NZ is a government owned airline and considered to be one of the "faces" of New Zealand, so I don't think that making money is a big concern for them. The United flights from San Fransisco to Denver and Denver to Kansas City were also good flights.
Posting on the vacation will now shift from Face Book to this blog. FB has severe limits on the amount of text in each post and I could not tell the story of our vacation there. I will be posting the entire trip again here with more photos and much more written information about our adventure. We have lots of things to catch up on after being gone for over a month so it may take a while before I can get the posts going so please be patient and keep checking us for new stuff.
The trip was great, but it is good to be home again.
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