We left New Zealand on Christmas day, because flights are WAY cheaper if you are willing to fly on Christmas. I had no qualms about that as I have never really had an attachment to celebrating holidays on a specific day… and I do have an attachment to saving money.
After you factor in the time change and the fact that we cross the International Dateline, our Christmas ended up lasting 41 hours. Theoretically, this sounds wonderful, until you go through 41 hours of people wishing you a Merry Christmas and NOTHING being open.
Our day started bright and early in New Zealand, with us waking up at 3am in order to make our flight. We didn’t want to bother the guy we rented our car from early in the morning, so we returned it the night before. Instead, we decided to walk the 3 miles from our accommodations to the airport. With all our bags, this took over an hour (and ended up being a lot more painful on the shoulders than I expected… must pack lighter in the future).
We flew from Christchurch to Sydney, arriving at 9am Sydney time where we had an 8 hour layover. We learned from our travelling negligence on the way there that you cannot leave the airport in Sydney without an Australian visa, and you cannot obtain the visa arriving in Australia. This time we planned ahead… except somehow we had applied for our visas using the wrong number on our passports. Fortunately they straightened in out in about 10 minutes and let us loose in Australia!
Being Christmas, everything was closed, so finding somewhere to eat was a nightmare. Eventually we found one small café where I struggled to find something gluten-free. Despite the lack of places being open, we did at least get to enjoy the sights in Sydney before heading back to the airport for the next leg of our Christmas journey.
The flight to San Francisco was actually quite pleasant, since the lack of holiday travelers meant everyone had an entire row of seats to themselves. I was able to spend most of the flight sprawled across a row of three seats, and managed to sleep most of the way.
Upon arrival in San Francisco, it was weird to have people walking around wishing you a Merry Christmas. I kept thinking “But that was yesterday! It’s over now!” Since it was now (Christmas) morning in California, we had our fifth breakfast of the ‘day’:
- At our hotel in New Zealand at 3am (NZ time)
- At the Christchurch airport around 7am (NZ time)
- In Sydney around 10am (Sydney time)
- On the plane after a good sleep (no idea what time)
- In San Francisco around 10am (California time)
We finally arrived back in Austin around 7pm and we were starving… only to realize it was STILL Christmas and there was still hardly anything open. We were too tired to try to figure out a viable restaurant, so we just went home.
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