Our flight out of Queenstown was at 9:50, so not too bad of an early morning. Everything went fine and the flight was an easy 2 hours. Other than some bug bumps on the descent, it was very uneventful.

I can’t believe we’ve carried this little baby doll around the world for almost a year now.

After we landed, we took an Uber into central Auckland. We are just here for a few days and it’s much cheaper to stay in a hotel without a car than an Airbnb with a car, so we’re back to being city dwellers.

We dropped our stuff and headed right back out for a late lunch. We walked down to the water and ate a restaurant with the strange name of Hello Beasty. It was the best meal we’ve had in a while. At home we love trying new, interesting restaurants. On this trip we’ve stuck to sort of boring, mid-level stuff, both because of the budget and because we want tried and true for Millie. It was a treat to have sashimi, spicy dumplings, interesting herby salads, and so on.

We didn’t have plans for the afternoon but realized we were next to the maritime museum. We walked over and tried to talk it up for Millie by drawing the comparisons of New Zealand’s earliest settlers to Moana. It kind of worked.

The museum had a bajillion replicas of old boats that Māori people would have used to explore and fish.

But most of the museum was dedicated to more recent vessels, all the way up to recent Americas Cup boats. I wished it was more about early settlers and their culture and less about boats. My review of a Maritime Museum: could have had less boats.

It has been interesting to compare the cultural difference between how modern day New Zealand and Australia talk about their earliest inhabitants. In Australia, almost every building you go in has a land acknowledgment, all galleries included aboriginal art, it was everywhere. Here, there seems to be very little mention of the Māori—or maybe it’s just blended into everything instead of put on a pedestal? I’m not sure why this is. It could be that the Māori people arrived here so much later than the aboriginals, or it could just be the places we’ve been so far.

When they made the announcement on the loudspeaker that the museum would be closing, Millie did an exaggerated “Yes!” fist bump in the air.

We walked along the wharf and found a small playground. Millie did her thing of asking every kid to play, then making a best friend, then chatting up their parent. Tonight she took it a step further, and after telling a mom our whole story we heard her ask “would you like to meet my parents?” The lady agreed and Millie brought her over to us and introduced us. Two introverts with an extrovert child.

It started getting dark so we walked back to the hotel, stopping for some snacks on the way.