Safe Arrival in New Zealand

What a crazy last few days! We found out Tuesday afternoon that our visas had come. It took a call to the Australian Embassy, but once the call was made we had visas within a few hours! Our plane tickets were made for Thursday, so we had basically one day to get everything packed up and ready to go. Thankfully, we hadn’t ever really unpacked in Utah, so the packing up didn’t take long. We had to wrap up some last minute details, but were ready to go by Thursday morning. Aaron took us to the airport. He dropped us off at 10 a.m. and 35 hours later, we were in Auckland. It was a LONG tripJ . Overall though, we had a good experience. We had a six-hour layover in Dallas, but once we finally got on the plane for New Zealand things were pretty smooth. Our tickets were in economy class, but the flight wasn’t full, so we were each able to have 3 seats to ourselves, so we could pretty much layout to sleep. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed ever, but we slept pretty well in spite of the pokey seat belts etc. We left Dallas at 10 pm and flew south, so we flew in darkness the whole time. We got to Brisbane, Australia at 6 am their time, but it was 1 pm our body time. The sun was just coming up in Australia, but we’d been in darkness the whole 15-hour flight. It was weird to have it dark outside for so long. I’m not used to sunrise at 1 pm. We had a two-hour layover in Brisbane and then caught our flight to Auckland. It is beautiful here and the weather is wonderful. We flew out of Salt Lake in a snowstorm and landed in a vacation paradise. The Self Reliance missionaries we will be training with met us at the airport and took us to our apartment. The area of town our apartment is in is a poor part of the city. We will be staying here for 12 days for training meetings and job shadowing.

Our apartment, all 300 square feet of it!

Our trainers are a couple from Beaverton, Oregon. Again, since we won’t be here very long, we won’t unpack anything except the basics. Moving to a foreign country for a year and a half requires quite a bit of luggage!

Lots of luggage!

Today, we went to church. It’s Sunday here, we completely lost Friday on the way down. The International Dateline is out in the ocean somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. We left the US on Thursday and arrived here on Saturday, so this morning it was time for church! The ward we are in is made up of people from Samoa and Tonga, as well as native New Zealand Maoris. It was fun to go to church with people who, for the most part, wear native dress.



We are still dealing with jet lag. Hopefully, I will be able to stay awake during the meetings tomorrow! Interestingly though, the time change between US Mountain time and New Zealand time is only four hours, so that will help with the adjustment. We will have to adjust again when we go to Sydney, there are three time zones between Sydney and Auckland, and so we will add another three-hour adjustment to our bodies when we move up to Sydney. There’s seven hours between Idaho/Utah time and Sydney time. Thankfully, we will have a couple of weeks between time change adjustments, and none of them are very big jumps.

We are looking forward to this week and learning more about our work assignment. We have training for four days and then get to job shadow for three days and then we are on our own! We are the only Self Reliance missionaries assigned to Australia. We are launching the program in Sydney and then it will move to other parts of the country as time goes on. I am excited to beginJ.