Sarah is currently at 32,000 feet, traveling at 547 miles per hour, about half-way across the Pacific right now! Needless to say, we are all very excited to see her (even if we have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to go pick her up)!
It will be fun to be all together again, and catch up with her first semester at Reed, and catch her up with our experiences in New Zealand so far. There are a lot of things we’ve been waiting to do after she arrives, so we can go once, and all together. (It’s both Christmas and Summer break down here, so everything is shut down for a few weeks while everyone is out on vacations.) We’ll be going to the Auckland Museum, where they have a good Maori cultural show, go to Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World, the island of Tiritiri Matangi, and out to the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days in January. If it works out, we also might try and get down to the glowworm caves in Waitomo, the geothermal area around Rotorua (like Yellowstone, I believe), and possibly the Hobbiton tour. Or maybe just some day trips out of Auckland – there’s plenty of fantastic treks along the shore or in the Waitakeres. We’ll also go back to Muriwai, where the gannets should have laid their eggs by now, and perhaps even some hatched. So many possibilities!
Time for bed now – alarm clock is all set and ready to go!