Cain Manor

There was quite a long flight (8 and a half hours) from Auck­land to Hon­olulu, which took us from across the inter­na­tional date line. Jus­tine was very excited about gain­ing back her lost day which meant an extra day in Hawaii, and I was excited about get­ting younger. Once we got into the Hon­olulu air­port, I started notic­ing things were sub­tly dif­fer­ent. First, it was the air­port. It was a lit­tle bit more run down than any air­port I’d seen on this adven­ture.
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Leav­ing Syd­ney was bit­ter­sweet. The weather had changed, so it wasn’t quite like leav­ing par­adise, and we stayed in a hor­ri­ble hotel. Our flight was quite early the next morn­ing (~7 AM), get­ting us into Auck­land early in the after­noon. Usu­ally you think of New Zealand as being right next to Aus­tralia (I call it Australia’s Canada), but it was a 3 hour flight. While we were fly­ing into Auck­land, I was able to see the waters below, and they were much more beau­ti­ful — clear and green — than the waters I’d seen going into Syd­ney, Mel­bourne or Perth. Com­ing through cus­toms, the Cus­toms Agent remarked upon the num­ber of stamps in my pass­port, which always makes me happy (it’s hap­pened a few times before).
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We woke up from our lovely tent at the “King’s Canyon Wilder­ness Lodge”, or at least I did. Jus­tine slept in while I got up for a early morn­ing hike. Ear­lier, when I men­tioned where we were stay­ing, I didn’t yet know about the cof­fee maker. It was mag­i­cal, and at 5 AM, I fell in love with it. You press a but­ton, and one fan­tas­tic cup of cof­fee comes out. It was the best cof­fee I’d had in Aus­tralia, and all it took was the push of one lit­tle but­ton. My dri­ver took me to the hike where we’d walk into King’s Canyon and then around it where I met up with a few other peo­ple. A Cana­dian cou­ple that retired early (55). The man looked like Mark Filler. They were both in the Oil and Gas indus­try (I was cor­rected when I said Gas and Oil), and an older Cana­dian woman that we spent a good amount of time with — she was on most of our bus trip. She was prob­a­bly in her 70’s, and kept up with me eas­ily (mainly because I was tak­ing many pho­tos.) The hike wasn’t too hard, but I was some­what sore after­wards. Inter­est­ingly enough the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was filmed here. I’ve not seen it, as I’m not big on my Trans­ves­tite Cin­ema, but I intend to catch up when I return to the States.
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