Day 27 Auckland - Return journey - Conclusion

A final "hello" to everyone,

Today is the return journey, a couple of anecdotes, and most importantly, some facts about the trip. I am currently sitting at the airport in Singapore and we have already completed the first flight from Auckland. This is only the second time I have flown on an A380 - it's quite impressive. It is now 9:15 pm here, in Auckland, it would already be 2:15 am on Saturday. After the outbound flight, I had 0.0% jet lag for some reason, but supposedly it's worse when flying east. Let's see - I'm just ignoring that. In a few hours, we will continue to Zurich and then to Hamburg.

Today in Auckland was short as we drove to the airport at 11:15 am. Before that, we had a very good breakfast at Odettes as the breakfast at the hotel was not good and was a bit of a rip-off. It is included, but you only get a little muesli and toast, the rest you have to buy, and it didn't even taste good yesterday. Strange concept. After breakfast, I had to have my souvenir from New Zealand (you remember, it was Wednesday and cryptic) "revised" again. It was done quickly, and now it's perfect. Then to the airport, and the rest is not exciting.

Anecdotes:

1. Hay fever

I suffer from it a lot, so autumn and winter in Germany are great for me. I had hoped that the flora in New Zealand would be so different that it wouldn't affect me there - but no, for four weeks in December/January, I had the full impact. I suspect it was grasses, luckily I had tablets with me.

2. Parking

At first, we were totally confused about how it works here. We had read the basic things, such as the colors on the streets indicating areas. Then there are parking garages, parking lots where you have to pay, but there are mostly these blue signs (like the one with "5", but it's a bad example because it's mostly "60" or "120" or something like that, and it doesn't say "Loading Zone" either). One might think that it somehow represents a number of minutes, or that it is the maximum time the parked car can stay, but how do you indicate the arrival time as a good German; there are no parking discs or anything? - The answer is simple: You don't! There are parking elves walking around, and when they see the car for the first time, they write the time on the tire with chalk. If the elf comes back and the maximum parking time has expired, you get a parking ticket. Yeah, really simple.

3. Bushfires in Australia

Terrible, what's happening there. We experienced it too. Cordula has already reported about the brown glaciers, and we also had a sun colored red, even though New Zealand is really far away from Australia.

Conclusion/Facts:

In total, we flew about 37,000 km, drove over 3,000 km by car, walked/hiked 330 km, and cycled 63 km.

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Travelessence for the perfectly planned trip, especially to Mrs. Feldheim, who took all our wishes into account during the planning and tailored the route and accommodations to us. Mrs. Feldheim also reads the blog, I'm curious if she makes it this far. For those interested: www.travelessence.de

We do not regret driving by car instead of a camper van. It was much more comfortable and not more expensive. Thank you to everyone who read along and shared the joy. Thank you also for the encouraging words to continue writing.

It was simply the vacation of our lives.

PS. small update: Just landed in Zurich and met DJ Bobo.