I left Denver on 4 Feb 2008 for San Francisco before heading off to New Zealand for 12 days and then Sydney Australia for two more nights, before coming back to the states. This then attempts to cover the highlights of my trip. Here is a quick breakdown of the trip:

San Francisco : two nights

New Zealand (North Island)
Auckland : two nights
Whakatane : one night
Rotorua : two nights
Wellington : one night

New Zealand (South Island)
Picton : two nights
Christchurch : two nights

Sydney : two nights

As luck would have it, primarily due to my current Premier status with United, I was upgraded for free to Economy Plus for both my SFO to Sydney and Sydney to LAX flight segments, which made life on those long flights quite a bit easier to deal with.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Auckland, Whakatane, Wellington, Christchurch, and Sydney. I did manage to see a live Kiwi (the bird) at a zoo of sorts, but since they need quiet and dark conditions, didn't get one captured on film. They were a bit larger than I was expecting, just a bit smaller than a bowling ball.

I learned some non-intuitive terms along the way. In Whakatane I found out that "Jumper" was our equivalent of sweater or sweatshirt, and in Picton figured out that "Tucker" means food.

By the way, some of the video clips I have posted do have audio with them, like for the Asian Short Clawed Otters. They were some noise makers.

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