The first week we were there we stayed with Georgie at her Dad (Dave) and her stepmom's (Renata) house. They were very kind to let us totally crash at their place for an entire week. Having two VERY loud and crazy Americans stay with you for a week has the potential of driving anyone nuts. Hopefully, they have fully recovered since we left :) haha. Anywhoo....Katie and I decided to start Day 4 off with some Insanity (this completely psycho, yes, insane, workout video series)....to explain the pic below, I must go back a couple of days....I think it was the 2nd day we were there....we went to Piha Beach and all over the place and then we returned late that afternoon back to Dave and Renata's house. You enter their house on the bottom floor and then come upstairs to the room where you see Katie and I standing in the pic below. Well, we came in from below and made our way up to the kitchen area and were having a snack (of course....we had snacks pretty much every 30 minutes all day, every day....hungry all-the-time Americans :) anyways, Renata and Dave were upstairs as well and after a few minutes, Renata said, "hey girls, can I ask you a favor, please?"....I turned towards her and gave her my attention...."We don't wear shoes in our house, so if you could go downstairs and take yours off, that would be great"....I just stood there with this blank look on my face. I totally thought she was joking. WHY? Because both her and Dave had shoes on (I didn't really look at the kind of shoes, but just saw they had shoes on) SOOOO, I totally thought she was pulling my leg. I looked over at Katie & Georgie (who I totally ASSUMED still had their shoes on as well) and saw they were both barefoot and staring at me with serious faces...the faces that said.."ah oh....you're gettin in trouble!!". I started to smile and laugh under my breath, until I realized no one was smiling or laughing....Oh my goodness!!! She's serious. So then I started stuttering (which I do when I'm really embarrassed or nervous)..."ummmm, OK, ummmmm....I'll go down and take them off, then....I'm sorry, Ummmm....". I felt like a complete moron! UMMMMM...hello Georgie!!! A sista's gotta tell me rules like that BEFORE I get called out!! Thanks alot! :) I go down and take off my shoes and when I return, I realize that the shoes they had on were "house shoes"....and I had had on my running shoes. Big difference. SO, from that moment on...I was constantly fearing that I would forget to take off my shoes everytime I came in the door....yeeeeeessshhhh. Thus, the picture below....when Katie and I decided to do the workout we HAD to wear our tennis shoes to do it and the only place to do it was upstairs...Georgie totally swore that it would be ok (her Dad and Renata were not home at the moment). SOOOO, we went ahead and did the workout and in the middle of it, Renata did come home....but thankfully, she just looked at us like we were crazy because of the pyscho workout we were doing....not b/c we were wearing our shoes upstairs....we were relieved :) OK, so that ended up being a MUCH longer explanation to the picture...but I'm sure you get the idea :)
As I mentioned before, we definitely ate some snacks while we were there. The top ranked snacks were: (in no particular order) CHEESE, HUMMUS & PITA CHIPS, CHEESE CHOCOLATE, CHEESE, and CHEESE....
We toured around downtown Auckland a bit (particularly going to a quabillion T-shirt shops in hopes that Katie would find "the one" NZ T-shirt that she was looking for :) We saw some cool Christmas decorations along the way (yes, it was very odd seeing Christmas decorations and being in the middle of summer there...)
In 2002, we stayed in Auckland for a few days for some de-briefing time as our summer mission trip was coming to a close. The only place we really saw while we were there was Queen Street. I had no idea that there was SOOOOO much more to Auckland than just downtown....glad I got to experience so many of the other lovely places this trip :)
The Sky Tower....On Mark's Stag day (Bachelor party)....his friends took him bungee jumping off the top of the Sky Tower....fun times!
On Day 5, we went on a cool little hike. Not sure what the place was called, but we had a blast....
The water was WAY up since it had monsooned for the first several days that we were there...
Very Sexy, Georgie....
Katie LOVES posing for the camera...
Cool waterfall...
OK, I KNOW this is DISGUSTING....but I am documenting our trip and this was a huge part of our trip....yes, this my friends, is a ginormous lugie (not sure the correct spelling of that word)....and yes, it is mine. You see, I have this constant problem of having to hock up huge amounts of nastiness out of my chest and throat. I don't know why. I just always have to do it. My problem was REALLY bad while we were in NZ. Not sure if the change of climate or what did it, but I did some serious hocking up over there. This beautiful specimen came flying out of my mouth and landed on Mark's dashboard (sorry Markie :) when I COUGHED. All I did was cough and this is what came up...wow. I HAD to take a picture, even though I almost threw up when I saw it (as did Katie and Georgie who witnessed this event :)
After the hike, we went to the grocery store and picked up some yummy food to make for dinner as well as some yummy ingredients for watermelon margaritas....
None of us had ever made watermelon margs before, but we figured they'd be good simply b/c they were watermelon :)
The taste-tests.....
Yep....they were goooooood....
Georgie cooking up her chicken breasts....haha
Day 4 & 5 = Fantastic!!
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