anchovy & pepperoni

(Click image for more pics on Flickr)

First of all, we decided to go to New Zealand because it was a good time for Pepper and I to go on such an adventure and because of all the good we've ever heard about the place. For our inaugural post here, I'll share some of what we've been up to for the past nearly 3 weeks.

Our flight left Denver around 11AM, stopped over in LAX until 8PM and we got in to Auckland at 6AM two calendar days later. We stayed about 20 minutes south of the city for our first night, where we also bought a cell phone, a socket adapter for the weird plugs they use here and rented a car. We got a Toyota hatchback called a FunCargo, which I've never seen back home, but it was efficient and roomy, as the name suggests, and it worked perfectly. It's easy to tell when you have an American learning to drive on the left side of the road because the wipers come on instead of the turn signal. It took at least a couple days to really get used to driving a "right hooker". We stayed our next two nights about two hours (200 km) southeast of Auckland in a city called Tauranga. We had an idea, based on the research Pepper was able to do online, that we'd like to check out the bay area east of Auckland (The Bay of Plenty) as a place to live, and Tauranga is the largest city in that area. The ward we attended was kind of small, but everyone was so friendly and warm that they all introduced themselves to us and offered whatever they could. On the last day of our rental we made it back to South Auckland and bought a '91 Mitsubishi Galant, which is a manual and required some more careful attention to get used to. After buying a car, we embarked on our tour of the Coromandel Peninsula in search of a suitable home. It's a hard time to find a place to live in the Bay because school is about to get out for the summer and a lot of kiwis are taking their vacations at the beach. So we camped from town to town, unable to find the right combination of a place for rent and potential job opportunities, until we wind up in Tauranga again. As we're gassing up to push on 9 hours south to the capital Wellington, we decided on a whim to give it one more try in Tauranga. Luckily, the next day we met a bishop from one of the wards and they took us in until we found a perfect, furnished one-bedroom apartment right on the beach three days later. So, little after a week of arriving in Auckland we bought a car and settled into a great little apartment. Our next endeavor was, and still is, obviously to find gainful employment, but we both feel very blessed to be where we are.

By the way, subsequent posts will not be so text heavy, we're just trying to sum up an eventful couple of weeks for all you friends and family. And do feel free to add comments should you feel so inclined.