The Long Trip Home: Auckland to Fort Lauderdale through Tahiti and Los Angeles

While we never had a real end date to our trip per se, Colleen was adamant that we get back to the United States in time to attend her brother’s university graduation on the first of May. Not only was it an important family event, but her brother had sat through so many of her graduations (high school, undergraduate, medical school, residency) that she felt she could not in good conscience miss his big day. As the trip progressed, we began to realize that the graduation would end up impacting our return date, so as early as February we started looking into flights home. We asked a travel agent in Philadelphia who has been helping us out throughout our trip to look into it, and she got back to us with a very reasonable flight that went from Auckland to Tahiti, Tahiti to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale, so we told her to go ahead and get it for us. So that was it, our last leg, the long trip home…. Of course we couldn’t resist one more adventure, so we arranged a 4 day layover in Tahiti and a 12 hour layover in Los Angeles. We would end the trip with a bang not a whimper.

Champagne over the Pacific

We have flown over 20 times on this trip, and I would have to say that the flight from Auckland to Tahiti with Air Tahiti was the best of the lot. Lots of leg room, great meals, good inflight entertainment and the wine and champagne flowed like water. There is something about a champagne toast as you fly over the International Date Line that just screams out sophisticated international traveller. Speaking of the International Date Line, boy did I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. We had been changing times zones throughout the trip, loosing time as we went, and now was time to get it back. Makes sense as a concept, but I just never seemed to be able to get it straight in my head. How could you leave Auckland at 2:15 pm on the 24th of April and arrive in Tahiti at 9:10 pm on the 23rd after a 5 hour flight? It just doesn’t make sense. Colleen took a perverse pleasure in my confusion, teasing me by saying things like “remember tomorrow when we were in Auckland” or “yesterday let’s go out for a drink after dinner”. I was a very confused Costello to her deadpan Abbot.

Sunset in Paradise

Tahiti was pretty special. It was more expensive than anywhere else we’ve been (4 days in Tahiti cost us the same as 4 weeks in Laos), but there is something about being on a small island in the middle of the Pacific, that can’t be beat. Actually, Tahiti is a bit of a misnomer. Tahiti is not a country, it is just the name of the biggest island in French Polynesia, which is a chunk of the Pacific the size of Europe encompassing 130 islands. Our flight landed in Tahiti, but we only spent one night there. The morning after our arrival, we took a ferry to Tahiti’s sister island called Morea, and rented a bungalow on the water at Cook’s Bay. What a beautiful place. Although this trip is technically our honeymoon, it has certainly not been a conventional one. Not many of our adventures to date would qualify as typical honeymoon activities, and not many locations would qualify as typical honeymoon destinations. Cook’s Bay on the other hand had honeymoon written all over it. We spent three days enjoying swaying palm trees, brilliant sunsets, cool ocean breezes, a cozy cabana, great food and each other’s company.

The Honeymooners

Of course we couldn’t resist having a little fun in paradise, so we did get some diving in. Colleen and I did a shallow dive in one of the lagoons inside the island’s barrier reef and were rewarded with the clearest waters I’ve ever been in. Visibility must have been 60 metres, and although we didn’t go deep, the diving was absolutely fantastic. The second dive was definitely the highlight though, my first ever shark dive (needless to say Colleen gave that one a pass). What an experience. The water was chummed with chunks of dead fish and fish blood. We were almost immediately surrounded by hundreds of fish of all makes and sizes, and before long dozens of black tip sharks showed up. Black tips, so called because of the black tips of their fins, are only about a metre long, but they look vicious, like sleek grey torpedoes, and are quite beautiful in their own way. Add to that a massive giant trevally that kept zipping by my head and a spotted ray gracefully swimming by overhead, and the experience would easily have topped any other in my under water experience, but there was more to come. Towards the end of the dive, three lemon sharks showed up and started nosing around. Apparently lemon sharks do not attack people, but it’s hard to be rational about that kind of information when three 2.5 to 3 metre long grey monsters start circling you 25 metres underwater.



Heart attack on a bun

Our flight out of Tahiti was relatively uneventful (we did cross the equator again – 5th time I think), and we arrived in Los Angeles at 11 am on the 27th. We cleared customs before noon, and our redeye flight to Fort Lauderdale left at 11:45 pm. This left us with half a day to kill, so we asked around and found a bus that would take us to a train that would take us into the city. We choose to visit Hollywood. Actually, we choose to visit Pinks, which happens to be in Hollywood. Pinks is LA’s famous hot dog stand, and we figured what says “welcome to the USA” better than a cardiac arrest inducing chili cheese dog and fries. As if that weren’t enough, we found an In and Out (home of the absolute best hamburger in the world) and indulged in a couple of cheese burgers. Stuffed with processed cheese and cholesterol, we made our way back to the airport for our flight to Florida.

So here we are in Fort Lauderdale. We did make it to Colleen’s brother’s graduation, which was nice, but the highlight was the shock on his face when he saw us. We actually never told him we were coming, so we managed to pull off the surprise of the decade. The look on his face as the realization slowly dawned that it was his sister looking back at him over a folded newspaper from across the bar was worth the trip across the pacific and then some.

As for us, I would like to say we’re home, but frankly we don’t have a home, so the adventure continues. We’re leaving for Philadelphia this weekend, then to New Hampshire for a wedding, then to New York. After that who knows, we’re still trying to figure things out, we’ll let you know what we come up with.


Michael
Fort Lauderdale
Florida