In our wedding program, we had a quote from Winnie the Pooh that said, "I knew when I met you, an adventure was going to happen." Pam and I started our honeymoon adventure around noon on Saturday, Feb 9th, with a flight to San Francisco where we had a four hour layover. From there we boarded a giant Air New Zealand 747 for the 13 hour flight to Auckland. Overall the flight didn't feel nearly as long as I expected. Pam watched a couple movies while I geeked out on some programming books and the manual to our SLR camera. The flight landed in Auckland around 5am so we slept for most of the latter half of the flight. I guess one perk of the consulting lifestyle is learning to sleep on planes.

A trip across the International Dateline set us down in New Zealand on Monday morning. Once we arrived in Auckland, we had another four hour layover before hopping a flight to Queenstown. We spent the afternoon in Queenstown, mostly prepping for our hike. We rented gear for the hike and bought four days worth of food. We also walked around town a bit and had lunch at an old barn the has been converted into a restaurant called Cow. Pizza there was great. Queenstown is beautifully set in the mountains and feels like a ski town with a bunch of shops concentrated in the center. One downside is that everything is extremely expensive. $4NZ for a Coke makes it feel like London or New York. The exchange rate helps a bit ($1USD:$1.2NZ), but it still feels expensive.

That afternoon we hopped a bus to Te Anau where we met Billy and Desi from Denver. They told us about their awesome trips to Machu Picchu and Kilamanjaro/Tanzania, both of which are high on our list for future trips. In Te Anau we picked up a few more things and had dinner. At that point we were exhausted from two straight days of nonstop travel, so we called it a night early to get some rest for the hike