Last Day in Auckland

If you don’t wander around, you won’t discover new things. That was what George told me on our wandering walk on Monday. Our last full day in Auckland started out with a lot of intention and then transformed into a meandering day with lovely, fun surprises.

The first task to complete was to find a mailbox and it turns out that there are public mailboxes all over the place - we just didn’t realize what they were. I didn’t get a picture, but will try in the next town, in case you are ever over here looking for one :-) Task two was to do with the phone. We have been having bad luck with our ESIMs that we purchased for our time in New Zealand. We got them working, but then Verizon appeared to be overriding them whenever we tried to use the internet and so we decided to purchase another phone to use as a hotspot with a physical SIM card in it. This way we can keep our numbers and stop having to mess around with the ESIM. Having done this, we went back to the phone carrier to check in about adding more data. With all of our must dos completed, we thought we would grab some lunch and head out for a last long walk through some part of Auckland. There are so any great places to eat and we decided to try another middle eastern place for some delicious Falafel sandwiches called Celine’s. It did not disappoint!

We were on Queens street, which is a main street in the Central Business District that we had walked up and down several times and we had noted that there was a tattoo shop. I’ve been trying to talk George into getting a tattoo for years and so when he said “sure” I hurried him into the shop! There were two young tattoo artists from Chile who helped us to select just the perfect design of a Lebanese Cedar tree….so excited!

Of course, one celebrates new tattoos with some ice cream and a flat white before heading out for a short walk along the waterfront. That short walk turned into and 5 mile exploration into a new neighborhood that we hadn’t yet explored called Parnell. This was a very nice neighborhood with beautiful houses and then so many cute shops and restaurants. Here are some pics of the cuteness.

We found a little outdoor food court with a bar and another middle eastern restaurant run by a Syrian family. The food was exceptional and they were all so friendly, so this was a great conclusion to our wandering walk. We ended up walking 8 miles - about 5 more than I planned…