After a stressful night full of concern, we arrived in Auckland this morning. Loaded up with carry-on luggage and pillows, we ventured through face recognition at immigration. Clare had problems as she has changed her hair since her passport photo was taken. So I unloaded everything so i could sit down while I waited for her to pass through immigration the old fashion way - I think that means she got an immigration stamp inner passport while mine just got scanned. Once she had joined me officially in New Zealand, I loaded myself up with everything and we went and checked my Visa status. The Air New Zealand staff were confused why I had had any problems - everything was fine. The girl back in Perth caused us unnecessary stress - hopefully thats the worst thing that happens on this trip! With my boarding pass to LA in my hand, I let out a sigh of relief.
We hired a car and spent the day driving around Auckland in a somewhat random fashion. We eventually stumbled across the
Mission Bay Cafe where we had a delicious breakfast - mega yum! We then drove to the volcanic mound and collapsed volcano. It was kind of weird to think that there was this volcano right in the heart of a major city but cool never the less (no pun intended). After a nice relaxing day, we drove back to the airport.
Checking that we had all of our belongs out of the hire car, we couldn't find our holiday folder. We searched all through the car but it just wasn't there. Cue major panic. The folder not only had our itinerary, it had every hotel booking we had made and worst of all, all of our credit card information - if the wrong people found it, they could spend our entire US holiday funds! Rushing into the airport terminal, we headed to the cash passport help desk to report that our information was missing. the man at the counter said we had to nofity the cash passport people that we had lost our information... which is what we were trying to do. For reasons that I cannot understand, he didn't want to help us. he said we had to ring a particular number and pointed me to a pay phone. The number he told me to ring is some sort of number that you can call from pay phones - again, I don't know why. Back at the help desk, I told the man the number wouldn't work. Not believing me, he walked to the pay phones and tried it. Sure enough, I was telling the truth. Still unwilling to help me, he wouldn't use his phone or let me use it to report the lost info. Rather than turning into the Hulk, I walked away from him. We tried airport lost and found, and we tried the airline's lost and found - no body had found anything. With boarding about to start, we headed to the departure lounge in a state of despair. We simply had no choice but to deal with it in LA when we got there.
With Clare and I both at the end of our emotional tether, we broke down into tears as we waited to board the plane. Just as boarding was about to start, we were personally called up first. Low and behold, the wonderful Air New Zealand staff had our travel folder! It turns out that when I unloaded everything I was carrying at Immigration, the folder had fallen behind the chairs. They had found it and had been regularly paging us all day in the transit lounge, but as we had been driving around Auckland, we hadn't been in the transit lounge! Overly grateful beyond words, we were so happy to have the folder back in our hands - the Air New Zealand staff went above and beyond!
Once again, I hope that's the last thing to go wrong on this trip!
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