Cruise to New Zealand, Australia

We started out 2018 by taking January and February off of SOWER projects.  This was so we could join my sister and her husband on a cruise.  We have not been on a cruise since I graduated college, so it has been over 40 years.  RV Craze? We were wondering just how much cruising has changed in that time.  We were to find out shortly. 

Of course, the first thing we had to do was to fly to where we boarded the cruise.  Since the cruise was New Zealand and Australia, we had to fly to Auckland, New Zealand.  We drove to Atlanta and met my sister and her husband at the Atlanta airport. From there we flew to Los Angeles, then to Fiji, then to Auckland.  That is a lot of “seat” time.  We did have layovers, but it was still a long time to get there. 

One interesting thing, we crossed the international date line.  Since we left January 13, we landed in Auckland on January 15^th.  My sister’s birthday was the 14^th and we skipped right over that.  She said she did not want to skip her birthday this year as it is the year she is eligible to start getting her social security. I guess we made up for it on the way back because we flew back on groundhogs day and had to live that day twice.   Sounds like a movie theme.  At least we did not have to wake up to Sonny and Cher on the radio (you will get the reference if you saw the movie).

We stayed in Auckland for a couple of days to sightsee before boarding the cruise ship, the “Radiance of the Seas”.  While in Auckland, my sister Barb was able to see a friend of hers that had the “Coffee News” franchise for New Zealand.  Since Barb had 10 franchises in the Ocala, Florida area, they had a good time of fellowship together.  The best thing is she gave us a tour of Auckland.  There is nothing better than a tour of a foreign city than getting one from someone who lives there. Since it was January in the states, and New Zealand is below the equator, it was summer here.  The gardens were beautiful.

The day of our boarding had arrived.  We got a taxi to the ship and boarded without incident.  We walked all the decks and looked over the entire ship to make sure it was “see” worthy.  It was especially worthy in the food department. 

That first night we were out to sea as we sailed toward the Bay of Islands.  Of course for us newcomers to the sea, we (read this we as Gail) were a little nervous being out in the middle of the water with no land in sight.  The weather was windy and rainy, so the ship rocked a little.  In the middle of the night (about 2am) Gail wakes me up and says with a worried voice, “We are slowing down”. I groggily wake up and we turn on the TV to the info channel to look at our speed.  Sure enough we had slowed about 0.3 knots.  That is less than ½ mph.  Then Gail says in a scared voice that we were rocking.  She was afraid that the ship was going to tip over.  It had been years since we had seen The Poseidon Adventure, but this must have weighed on her mind.  After being up for over an hour, I (Wayne) said it was obvious that we will never go on another cruise – and we still had 13 more days to go on this one.

Well, we made it safely to the Bay of Islands, but because of the rain and rougher seas that day, we did not get to go on shore and did not get to see anything but clouds and rain. So we left the Bay of Islands and headed to our next port of call.

As we traveled, out table in the dining room was next to the outside window, so we always had a beautiful view.

Our next port of call was Tauranga, New Zealand.  We took an excursion to a village of the Maori people in the Whakarewarewa village (don’t ask me to pronounce that).  At the village we watched a presentation of some of the dancing and chanting of the people.  Afterwards we toured the village and the hot springs that are there.  The women of the village cook their food in some of the hot springs, some bathe in another portion.  It was all very interesting.  Since we had missed by sisters birthday, our native guide sang a special for Barb in the native language.

We also visited a Kiwi farm.  Kiwi grow on vines much like grapes.  They are supported on a net-like structure so that you can walk under them for harvest. Just look at the number of Kiwi in the picture.

The next day we just cruised all day as we went to our next port of call in Wellington, New Zealand.  I will interject here about the “towel” animals that our cabin staff did.  During the course of our tour we had a snail, swan, bear, joe cool reading the daily schedule, a puppy and a monkey.  I have included a couple of pictures of them since they really were works of art.

Wellington is a large spread out city with a lot of hills.  It is normally very windy, though we hit it on one of the calmer days.  It is also the home of Miramar picture studios.  Many major motion picture films use their expertise in their films. We rode the cable car, took a bus on and off tour and walked through botanical gardens.  It was beautiful and quite a modern city. New Zealand has always been a place to raise sheep. We took a bus tour that ended at a sheep farm for a demonstration of shearing sheep and a sheep dog herding the sheep by just listening to the whistle of the master.  It was incredible that the dog about ½ mile away would do just what the master wanted.  The shearing of the sheep was also interesting.  It brought to mind the scripture about the Messiah who as “a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he opened not His mouth”.

The next port was Akaroa, New Zealand. 

From Akaroa, we visited Dunedin.  There were some good sights there, but the best was the tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory.  This tour will be available in the future, but the factory is actually being moved to Australia.  If you are a chocolate lover, this was the place to be.  There factory store sold bars of chocolate cheaper than anywhere else we visited (and we looked).  The picture I chose for Dunedin however was of their railway station, not the Cadbury factory.  I didn’t want your computer to malfunction from your drooling.

The last section of the cruise for New Zealand was cruising through the sounds on the southeastern portion of the Island.  They are really fiords. The weather that day was dreary with gray skies and light rain. It was that way through the Dusky and the Doubtful Sound, but the weather broke better as we went through the Milford sound.  The adjoining mountains were spectacular with numerous waterfalls.  You can get a little idea of their size by looking at the boats in the picture.

After we left the sounds, we had three days of cruising to get to Australia.  The swells were not as severe as the first day of cruising, so the 3 days went by very nicely.  This would be a good time to mention a lot of other things that happened on the cruise ship.  Every day there were movies on board that you could go see.  Every night there was some kind of show.  This included the “Boys in the Band” (a singing group singing 60’s music”, a magic show, a hypnotist, a dance team, a small play and numerous musical groups.  We thoroughly enjoyed all the shows and went to them all. 

One of the excursions we had signed up to take was the “all access tour” of the ship.  However, there was a virus that hit about 10% of the passengers.  To prevent the crew from getting sick, they canceled the tour.  We were disappointed because we wanted to ask the questions, like, can the boat tip over (remember the first night?).  But as we like to say, God is in the details.  So . . . when we disembarked at Newcastle, who should be standing outside?  The Captain! We talked with him for about 15 minutes asking all the questions we wanted to ask on the all access tour.  So we were able to get answers to all our questions and it did not cost near as much as the tour.

Since we did not get to take the all access tour, we did take a tour of the galley.  We were able to see the galley and how all the meals and deserts are prepared. The tour then ended with a special dinner for the participants.  All the staff were very professional and accommodating.  Our waiters at our table were very good.  Regan and Rouling gave us great service and went out of their way to do extra for us. 

Our final port of call was Sydney Australia.  Of course the most photographed structure as you enter the port is the Sydney Opera House.  We did not want to be different, so we also got a lot of pictures of the Opera House. It really is a unique building.  I have included one for you to see as well.

We planned the trip so we could spend a couple of days in Sydney to do a little sightseeing before we headed home.  We took a hop on hop off bus tour around the city the first day.  It was a good chance to see a lot of the city with the benefit of a recorded information tape.  We stopped at the famous Bondi beach and walked down the street there.  Even though the calendar said it was summer, the weather was cold and windy.  We are supposed to be at a famous beach and we are in hoodies to keep warm.

We did take a day tour to Scenic World and Featherdale Wildlife Park. They said at Scenic World, it is like the Grand Canyon.  I am not so sure though there was a lot of land and deep ravines.  We did take a rail car down which had quite an incline. Gail did not like that.  We came back up in a cable gondola which was scenic, but also a bit unnerving for Gail.

Then we went to Featherdale Wildlife Park. Barb had said that she did not want to leave Australia without seeing Koalas and kangaroos.  Here we definitely were able to see Kangaroos and Koalas.  Of course also we was all types of birds, wombats, Tasmanian devil, peacocks and all kinds of wildlife.  Of course I included pictures of them so you won’t have to travel all that way to see them.

We were fortunate to find a Koala awake as they sleep 14 to 18 hours a day. Some we saw on the trip looked liked they had been drugged.  They were sound asleep up in the tree.  You wonder how they kept from falling out.  There were numerous kangaroo and Barb was able to get a picture with the baby in the pouch.  She has not yet shared that with me. But as you can see in the picture, she even was able to feed a kangaroo.

It was a great trip.  Remember how I said after that first night that we would never take another cruise due to Gail’s first night.  Well, she did calm down and we did sign up for a cruise next year with Barb and Gary to the Greek Islands.  This has always been on Gail’s bucket list and so we will go so we can scratch one more thing off her list.  RV Crazy?

We caught a flight from Sydney to Fiji to Los Angeles to Atlanta and headed home.  While at one of the beaches, we did make a final reminder.