The flight home

Our 6:15 alarm didn't go off, but fortunately we had a wake-up call too. About 7:00 we were all breakfasted and ready to go...

 

We had a 40 minute drive to the airport. A bit frustrating, because we missed the only service station and couldn't fill up the rental car. The rental car company seemed OK with it...charged us an extra $5 or so.

These boys seemed so experienced at travelling...



Boarding pass in hand...ready to board our 14 hour flight



 

About 12 or 13 hours into the flight...getting a bit tired

Ryan fell asleep as we were waiting to disembark, so I had to carry him off the plane. He fortunately woke up and we could all walk across Sydney airport to the transfer desk. I spent about an hour trying to get boarding passes. In the meantime Ryan fell asleep again.

 

I carried him onto the next flight and he slept through most of it. Only woke about 5 minutes before we landed in Auckland. He was very surprised when he woke up on a plane...

Coming up to The Land of the Long White Cloud

After having on sniffer dog smelling something in one of our bags, I had it inspected. The friendly lady found a little leaf, smaller than a 10c piece, inside a bag inside my backpack. That was removed and we were finaly home!!

Spotted this huge cricket ball outside...the next thing to look forward to:

 

Had a nice sunset to welcome us back to NZ...

Last day of our Abu Dhabi stopover

Way back when we booked the accommodation for our 3 day stop over in Abu Dhabi, we thought it would be a good idea to book 3 different hotels...'so that we could see as much of possible of Abu Dhabi'.

Halfway through our trip we managed to change some of the booking, to two nights at the Radisson Blu and one at Hala Arjaan. After more than 3 months of travelling, we really wished that we just booked one hotel...

 

We did manage to get ourselves a late check out and spent the morning swimming.

 

 

Lunch was some airline crackers for Alex and some other open packet of crackers for Ryan.

 

As we left we went for a quick drive over the Yas Marina F1 circuit.

 

 

We drove past plenty of interesting hotels and buildings...

 

The hotel at the circuit

A funny round building

Water World

We got on the right motorway, but going the wrong way.

Did a loop around and finally got going the right way. It was very windy! Sand was blowing over the motorway.

 

 

Our last hotel room was quite nice. The boys got straight into going through the TV channel menu, figuring out what they could watch.

They looked at the view and then the TV with their binoculars...

 

Had a quick trip to the Mall to pick something up for dinner.

That's a lot of backpacks!!

We were back at the hotel just before sunset. It was so dusty we couldn't see very far.

 

There was time fo a quick swim before 7:00 when the pool was still open for children.

Had an argument ith the hotel manager about the children not being allowed to swim after 7:00. The solution was on-the-house ice creams for the boys. Everyone was happy...