Monday 6th May, 2013

It has been quite a season to be a Bradford City fan. Just before we left the UK we secured our place in the playoffs with victory over Burton, the same team we would play in the semi-final. I’d woken up early to watch us lose the first leg and was gutted that the season defining second leg was taking place while we were in a complete information blackhole en route from Tokyo (it can’t be long before we demand web access when we’re airborne). Happily there was 30 minutes of free wifi at Auckland airport leaving Christine, with eyes rolling, distancing herself from the weird, claret and amber clad person randomly celebrating in an airport (we won).

As we passed through immigration we had to declare whether there was any danger of bringing any foreign fauna or flora into New Zealand. Because we’d recently been in Japanese woods we had to open up our suitcases and show off our shoes – thankfully we’d cleaned them so we didn’t get stopped for too long.

As we landed we’d seen that Auckland was being lashed by torrential rain and because we didn’t fancy the walk from an Airbus Express stop to our accommodation we paid slightly more for a Super Shuttle to take us to the front door of the AirBNB where we were staying.

We didn’t really do much else with our first day in Auckland. In between napping to recover from the flight we went to the supermarket (food is expensive!), wandered along Queen Street in the pouring rain and Skyped with family for the first time since we’d left the UK.

All of our pictures from Auckland are arranged in this collection on Flickr.

Daily distance travelled: 8850km

Total distance travelled: 19,888km