Last night we got to our beach house in Raglan! This town is famous for their surfing. We have been watching them surf until dark, and now right at sunrise!
We're in the middle of a pretty crazy forest. All of the trees and plants are HUGE!
the view from our deck is absolutely amazing. I love the beach!
We are still trying to decide if we're going to take surfing lessons. We're scared!

Today was amazing!
I accomplished a huge life goal by coming to Hobbiton and checking out where The Lord Of The Rings was filmed! It was so beautiful! Everything was so green.
Our tour guide was named Jake, and he MOVED to New Zealand from the U.K. just to try to work here! He said he sent a letter a week for almost half a year before they finally hired him. He's living his dream job! He loves LOTR and challenged us to give him a question he couldn't answer! (we couldn't stump him).
It was amazing to see how much work and detail went into filming the movie. Jake said some of the places were only in the movie for 3-4 seconds, but they worked on this place for over two years!
They only let us go inside one place, unfortunately there was nothing inside but a dirt room! All the filming of inside the places was done at a studio in Wellington.
When our tour was over, we had some special ice cream called Hobbit Crunch! It was delicious!

Our place in Auckland is AMAZING! We got off the plane and took a five hour nap in our beautiful condo. On Sunday, we took a huge ferry boat to an island called Waiheke. We took a bus around the whole island, and got off at lots of stops to look around. It was BEAUTIFUL! It's so nice to be in SUMMER after all that winter.
Of course, I made Ian take a million pictures of me being a weirdo all over the island.
The best part was collecting shells to bring back to all of you!
​❤

It's taken a while to get used to some things out here on the Southern Hemisphere! All of the light switches are these tiny little switches that are hard to find at night! All of the plugs are different, and every plug has its own on and off switch!
The craziest thing to get used to has been the car! My husband keeps walking to the American driver side of the car, but the steering wheel is on the right side, and they drive on the left! It's even more strange to sit on the left side, that normally I control a car from, and NOT be in control!
There are also some other pictures of words that are different down here.
pram = baby stroller
lead = leash
trolley = cart
lift = elevator
hawkers = solicitors
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We left LAX (in Los Angeles, California) around 11pm Thursday the 16th, and flew 12.5 hours to New Zealand! The plane was enormous!
When we got onboard the plane, they had TVs on the seats with the map of our flight on them. It was funny to see that we really were flying across the world!
​They fed us three meals on the plane that we're DELICIOUS. Lots of people said the flight was going to be hard, but we slept most of the time and woke up for the meals! Look at our fancy options!
The view coming in on the plan was beautiful. There was so much ocean!

My husband Ian and I are heading out to New Zealand! I can't wait to update you on all of the things we'll do there!
We're VERY nervous about our upcoming 13-hour flight! Hopefully we have downloaded enough movies to keep us entertained!

I was so excited to come back to school with my new babies! Mrs. Finlayson brought her kids for my kids to play with too! We had a fun day!