I was so excited to spend the two days in Brisbane between cruises!

We disembarked from the cruise on Friday morning and spent most of the day catching up on some work at our hotel in downtown Brisbane. We found a really cool Mexican place for dinner. I'm not sure if Brisbane has a lot of restaurants that serve Tex-Mex food, but we ended up at two of them!

We were scheduled to fly to Brisbane from Sydney. Unfortunately, we missed our flight. I wasn't feeling great this day and when we got to the airport in Sydney, the agent who checked in our luggage handed our boarding passes to Brennan at 2:30. We had talked about the flight being at 4:40 all day, so we thought we had plenty of time to get lunch and then head to our gate. 

When we finished up lunch around 3:20 and went to go find our gate, it said the gate was closed! We were shocked and had to look over and over again at the boarding passes. Our flight was actually at 3:40. Neither of us could believe we missed it! 

Thankfully, it was very easy to rebook our flight for the next one that left about an hour and a half later. We made it to Brisbane easily. Learn from our mistake-always double check the boarding time!

We arrived back in Sydney after our time in rural Mudgee late Thursday night. We were both ready to be back in a city with lots of options of things to do.

Everyone we talked to emphasized that we had to see the beaches in Sydney. We are both beach people and the Sydney beaches are world famous for a reason. We spent Friday on Bondi Beach. The beach has sugary sand and the bluest water. You can see from the picture that the beach was busy, but we found a piece of sand easily and spread out the beach blanket we bought. 

We flew from Auckland to Sydney and arrived late in the evening. The next morning, we woke up and ventured out to see if we could get a good view of the Opera House and Harbor Bridge. We found the Royal Botanic Garden and walked through, admiring the flowers and trees. But the real excitement was getting to the edge of the water and looking out over the harbor. I've hoped to see Sydney for myself since I was a kid and the view was just as good as I had hoped!

After spending a little over a week on the South Island of New Zealand, we flew up to Auckland. We arrived after the devastating floods that closed the airport and caused a lot of damage throughout the city. We stayed in a central area and Brennan took advantage of this by doing some running through the parks. Auckland is much hillier than I was expecting, so I was extra impressed by his dedication to running!

We left Lake Tekapo and drove west, heading to Queenstown. It was a 3 hour drive, but a lot of the road was between mountains so it was very winding. We were able to stop off for a nice viewing area, called "Roaring Meg" just before getting into the Queenstown area. 

We left Christchurch and headed to the middle of the South Island. This part of our trip to New Zealand was the most challenging to plan and I was not really looking forward to it. I'm so glad I was wrong though-it was the best few days!

We rented a car in Christchurch and started driving west. Brennan did excellent driving on the left side of the road while sitting on the right side of the car! We enjoyed mountains around us and the 3 hour drive was relatively uneventful. 

Our time in Wellington was brief because we had more adventures planned! We woke up early and left our hotel to head to the ferry port. We took a 3 hour ferry across the Cook Straits from the North island of New Zealand to the South island. 

The ferry was large and had many seating areas, a few cafes and an outdoor viewing deck. We didn't spend much time outside because it was so windy, but it helped with my slight case of seasickness. 

Our time in Fiji came to an end, but we had a new country to visit-New Zealand!

When we got to the airport and checked in, we saw this bright sign. I guess common sense isn't always common?

I remember hearing about Fiji as a kid and thinking, “Wow, I will never go that far away. But that seems like a cool place.” And now we’ve been there.

We decided to go to Fiji by accident. Brennan found an award plane ticket to New Zealand with a stop on the way in Fiji for 6 days last May or June. We booked it, not knowing if it would actually work for us to go. We started booking details in November and it still didn't feel real until we were on the plane.

We flew from Los Angeles to Nadi. The flight was 10.5 hours, but we crossed the international date line multiple times while we flew. We left LA on Wednesday night and arrived on Friday-we completely skipped Thursday! The flight was amazing with really friendly flight attendants and very comfortable seats. Brennan and I both slept well and woke up in Nadi ready to start our day.