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Wednesday, February 26, 2025

2025 New Zealand: January 5th - Epilogue & Conclusions

 It was raining by the time we put everything in the car and drove up to refuel it. Arriving at the airport, we found the New Zealand checkin counter. We got our bags checked all the way into San Francisco and then bought some more chocolate and ate breakfast before going through the very understated and uncrowded security line for the flight to Auckaland.

In Auckland, however, things were super confusing—the international terminal necessitated that we walk out of the domestic terminal we were in and then redo our checkin. Fortunately, Xiaoqin found someone who whisked us right to the front of the Fiji Airways domestic counter who re-issued our boarding passes after the passport check, and then told us that since we were frequent flyers we could board immediately after the first class passengers.

The flight to Nadi was easy, but then there was awful long wait at the Nadi airport. It was 10:00pm and late before we were boarded. I must have slept a bit during the flight home because it didn’t seem that long. We picked up our baggage from the carousel with no problems, zipped through customs and border patrol because of the MPC app (even faster than the folks who were waiting in line for their global entry interview) and were soon at home. Our trip was over.

Conclusions

A lot of Americans like New Zealand. My conclusion is that much like Australia and the USA, it’s a country where there’s no public transit and you have to drive everywhere, so that makes Americans feel comfortable. The scenery is gorgeous, as expected, and I wish we’d had more time to visit places like Abel Tasman National Park, and obviously the system for getting Great Walks definitely makes planning a New Zealand trip a factor in how good you are at getting through their DOC system.


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