We arrived way to early for most hotels to allow this early a check in but we decided to give it a shot.  Much to our surprise, the hotel staff (extremely friendly) let us check in early after hearing of our grueling 18 hour travel ordeal.  The staff is warm, welcoming and extremely helpful.   Our hotel room is nice, we have a great view of the city including the Sky City Tower and the Albert Park below.  I’ll post some photos later and a complete review of the hotel after our stay here has ended.  The kids are doing great and held up remarkably well for the long journey.

Categories: Hotels, New Zealand
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We arrived in Auckland on Sunday, May 28 at around 7:00 a.m.  We proceeded off the aircraft, through customs (fairly easy) then straight to the car rental place where our first nightmare began!  After REPEATEDLY calling our credit card company, Capital One about our planned trip to New Zealand and our plan to make rather large transactions during our stay (hotels, airfares, car rentals, etc) our first credit card transaction was DECLINED!  Marge called Captial One irate that they had screwed this up after so much hassle (so much for the No Hassle Card) calling them before hand.  Ultimately American Express came to the rescue and we got our car.  It was then that the real challenge began: Sitting on the right side to drive on the left side of the road!  It is quite an experience!

Categories: New Zealand
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We are between two days, the flight from Houston to LAX was pretty smooth except the 1.5 hour delay leaving Houston.  We landed at LAX with just enough time to take a primative bus from one terminal to terminal 2 where our Air New Zealand flight was getting ready to board.  We boarded the 747-400 Jumbo and were on our way.  The 12.5 hour flight was fairly uneventful.  The food service was excellent, the entertainment entertaining and the sleep was anything less than restful.  Once we cross the international time zone we’ll be “jumping” into the future by one day.

Categories: New Zealand
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We left Houston an hour and a half late after quite an eventul week.  I had a great personal loss on Tuesday that consumed a great deal of time energy and emotion from me these past few days and I thought that this trip might not have happened but life happens for a reason and we must press forward.

Categories: New Zealand
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With only a few days before our trip, I wanted to run down some of the tools we used to plan our trip to New Zealand.  The most useful site was the official New Zealand Tourism website.  One of the biggest issues to overcome was selecting the right hotels.  Unfortunately it was difficult to find hotels that would accommodate two adults and two children;  We ran into a similar problem in France where hotels seemed to be designed to accommodate two adults and one child.  We’ll post more info (and reviews) about the hotels as we check in during our trip but for now here is a quick list of the top websites that helped us facilitate our trip:

Expedia – Great tools for reviewing hotels, locations, anemities, etc.  We booked our first hotel with Expedia and their subsidirary Trip Advisor provided very useful recommendations and honest tourist feedback about hotels.

Trip Advisor – As stated above, great for getting a run down of things to do in each particular city and recommendations from users about where to stay.  The only negative comment I have is that Trip Advisor is geared too much towards singles or couples with no kids.  Often, the boutique hotels or lodges they recommended did not accomodate any children under age 14 so we ended up skipping most of the top 10 recommended hotels.

SideStep – After searching most of the airlines and travel sites (like Orbitz), we finally opted to use SideStep to book our airfare.  It is somewhat ironic that Sidestep found us the cheapest airfare through a link to Orbitz yet while looking directly on Orbitz the airfare was much more expensive. Go figure.
Orbitz – Nothing special but this is where we booked our flight from the US to NZ.  We were referred here by SideStep.

Categories: New Zealand
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In planning our trip to New Zealand, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up with any “hidden” fees or charges on our credit cards which we would use for the bulk of our trip. We called up the following banks to inquire about their fees for international transactions. Here is what we found out:

• American Express charges 2% fee for foreign transactions
• Bank of America charges 3% fee for foreign transactions
• Chase charges 3% fee for foreign transactions
• Capital One charges 1% fee for foreign transactions
• Washington Mutual charges $3 fee/transaction on their debit card for ATM withdrawls despite claiming they’re “free”
• HSBC charges 1% fee for foreign transactions

After careful review, we made the decision to take Capital One & American Express with us for credit card transactions and our Washington Mutual Card for ATM withdrawls. We’ll be saving 2% on almost every transaction on the Capital One card and we’ll use AMEX for emergency purposes only; The rest of the cards will be staying home as punishment for their insolence.

Categories: Money, New Zealand
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The website is officially up and running. As I’ve busily worked on building the site, I’ve also been working on a parallel project – setting up our itinerary for our 18 day New Zealand trip. Our itinerary takes us from L.A. to Auckland where we hang out for 3 days; Drive from Auckland to Rotorua (1 day);Drive from Rotorura to Lake Taupo (2 days); Drive from Lake Taupo to Wellington (2 days); Fly from Wellington to Christchurch (4 days); fly from Christchurch to Queenstown (4 days) and finally Quenstown back to Auckland where we fly back to L.A. Everyone’s excited about our adventure to the south pacific and I can hardly wait to post some spectacular pics.

Categories: New Zealand
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