Day 49 - Bonus day in Auckland! Night at the airport hotel.

Sunday Feb 18
Because Lyn does church on Saturday, and Karen went with her we now had the opportunity to cram some sight seeing in Auckland in.
We had breakfast with Lyn and Bruce, packed up the car sans chilly bin, and headed into Auckland with the plan to see the sky tower first and see how long that took.
It's an impressive building with great views, if a bit expensive to park and ride up the elevator.

At ground level there were some bits and pieces of decorations for the Chinese new year.

We collected the car and decided to take a look at the aquarium, hoping that there'd be a cafe for some lunch.
The start of the aquarium has a recreation of Scott's base camp in Antarctica.

The revolving "ice" at the sides made this tunnel chilly

 Then there's a section for Antarctic penguins.

see the egg under the middle penguin

penguins.

After the Penguins there's a large tank by the cafe, we had a bite to eat while watching the fish, then we moved on to the deeper part where the turtles live.

The main tunnel of the aquarium has a conveyor, we rode this round four or five times. The Auckland aquarium was the first aquarium of its kind. Kelly Tarlton, the guy who built the place, had to invent the technique to bend the perspex to make the tunnels. Sadly he died not long after completion.

giant ray swimming

feeding time
We loved it. But we needed to get to the hotel, unpack the car in daylight, get the car back to the hire company and then get back to the hotel. so we left before closing time :(

When we emptied the car I forgot to check the sunglasses holder in the roof, so we lost another pair of sunnies.
Because of how the roads are, although it was a short distance from the hotel to the car hire drop off, it would have been a pretty long walk, so we used Uber instead.
Back at the hotel we had dinner in the restaurant. Then some repacking with trips to the lobby where there was a weigh scale. Finally all the bags weighed less than 23kg and we had managed to put one inside the other so we only had 3 suitcases to manoeuvre.
Alarms set for 0500 we got some sleep.