May 5th-7th: Arrival to Auckland

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Sunrise in Brisbane Australia on the airport
Sunrise in Brisbane Australia
After over 30 hours of travel, we have finally arrived in New Zealand! SDSU students flew out on May 5th from Minneapolis, MN and Sioux Falls, SD in three separate groups. While we all had the same destination, all of our flight experiences were very different. All but one student had flown before and others varied from having only flown once, to several times. Two groups flew from Minneapolis with one landing in Los Angeles (LAX), and the others landing in Dallas. The third group flew from Sioux Falls to also land in Dallas. From there, they traveled 14 to 17 hours to Australia with some landing in Brisbane and others in Sydney, with the final flight landing in Auckland, New Zealand. The flying experience was one some will always remember with a group of students flying out of Minneapolis having to experience the struggles of dealing with airport ticket errors while others had no hassle at all. With one delayed flight and a close call on making it aboard in time in LAX, we all made it in one piece. An interesting thing students got to experience was never seeing the light of day of Monday, May 6th due to the extreme time change with New Zealand being 17 hours ahead of back home.


After finally arriving in New Zealand, we made it through customs with little to no hassle and made our way through the airport to be greeted by our guides who will be with us throughout the entire trip, Ron and Kate. From the airport, we were ushered to our bus to load our luggage and make our way from the Auckland Airport through Glenfield to get to the city of Auckland where we checked into our hotel, Copthorne. During this time, many students got to witness for the first time the steering wheel on the right side of the car and traffic flowing opposite directions from the United States; driving on the left side of the road. Once we were assigned roommates for the night, we were able to freshen up for the night. From our hotel, we enjoyed a buffet meal at Fortuna Restaurant. With a wide variety of seafood, meats, and many deserts, none of us left hungry. From the restaurant, we took an elevator up the Sky Tower to see the spectacular view. Some students chose to stay further away while others traveled out onto the glass floor to get an even better look at 636 feet. Some students even went further to travel up a deck that stands at 722 feet. In total, the sky tower stands at 1,076 feet and is the tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere. Later, still we got to walk from the Sky Tower along Queens Street heading back to our hotel. This part of town is very close to Auckland University, but all students can agree it is very different from Brookings, South Dakota. After long travels and many hours in airports, we concluded our day back at the Copthorne Hotel to hopefully reset our internal clocks and wake up ready to experience more of New Zealand and travel to a new destination.
-Madison Posusta & Olivia Bailey

               
Minneapolis group waiting at LAX airport.
Minneapolis Group Waiting at LAX airport.
Flying in to New Zealand
Flying into New Zealand

Looking up at the sky tower
Looking Up at the Sky Tower


View from sky tower
View from the Sky Tower.

Group picture from sky tower
Group Picture from Sky Tower.


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