So I’m finished updating the blog about our New Zealand trip, I hope you all enjoy the photos and the little bits of our story. You can click the link at the top of the home page for the day by day posts. MK took over 1800 pictures, a few too many to get up here! I picked what I thought were the best to give you an idea of just how beautiful it was.

We were so lucky to have gotten the chance to go, and to have taken our time and seen so much.

So I know it’s been a little crazy over here at somegosoftly, but there’s been so much going on!!

It’s been a lot of fun reliving my trip through the little posts about it. To be sure, there’s so much more that there aren’t words for, everything was so beautiful and life changing. There’s not enough room for all the pictures, MK took 1800!! I should be caught up in a day or two…

The trip really inspired me to be more positive and a better listener. It was funny to come home so anxious to tell everyone about the trip, but instead to let them go on and on about what I missed in their lives while I was away. Maybe it was good timing for a decision like that.

It was great to get home in one piece, and we made it literally 30 minutes before there was ice on the roads. We got home and bought the last gallon of milk and bag of pasta (seriously) in the store and rushed home. It gave us a chance to recuperate before having to do anything, us being trapped at home for two days.

I was close to a nervous breakdown about how I couldn’t go out on my birthday without getting my hair and nails done, but thankfully it defrosted Thursday – just in time! – and I got “done up”. Thursday I ended up going out with WB and Snippy, et al. We went to a silly bar downtown but had a pretty good time.

So Friday was the big birthday, and I didn’t feel like doing anything, so I didn’t. That was kind of nice. KE and KE brought me to Sherlock’s, which was the perfect place to be on a birthday where you feel a little old for the first time, we were the youngest ones there. Snippy met us up and we laughed at the band and the dancers, and, well, everything. I ended up having a good time.

Saturday I couldn’t figure out what to do but KD suggested Vivo, a great choice. There were about 10 of us that then met up with some other friends at Whisky Bar. It was actually one of my best birthdays.

Saturday morning we went out at 10am on a tour of downtown provided by the hotel. We must have been feeling really touristy. He talked a lot about the city and it’s history and architecture, and I learned that that was a city I very clearly knew nothing about – it is apparently common knowledge that it should be underwater. Whatever.

We walked up through North Town and had some real Italian for lunch, saw City Lights, the famous bookstore; and the bar Kerouac used to hang out at. Cool.

There is this back alley type thing of about 2,000 stairs to hike up that is a short cut to Coit Tower, where some parrots hang out. We went this secret route to the tower and got our city views. RD had a Christmas party to attend, so RB took us to Bubbly, the champagne bar. It was dead, so we ran through the Hyatt, which had a huge Christmas display of miniatures, and then to the Embarcadero.

This is pretty much the coolest part of the city. They had a mini ice skating rink set up at which for some reason we ended up sending messages between teenagers at the top of our lungs. RB took us to about 30 spots of interest that he’d found, including a bar with a giant chair, and a firehouse that we took our picture in front of in the middle of the road. We made it to the side of RD’s town to see him briefly then almost fell asleep standing up, so we went home to sleep!

Getting to New Zealand, we travelled through San Fran in order to see my oldest and dearest friends, the Ryans. We arrived Friday and took ourselves from the hotel to Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a really cool dock style shopping area/strip mall. There are these wooden docks that giant seals lay out on. Giant. And they fight, and make a lot of noise. Pretty entertaining.

We took our time at this huge restaurant where we could see them from – eating for about two hours. RD called and met us up later that night for Na’an and Curry, which was one of the best Indian restaurants I’ve been to. He then took us to a bunch of the neatest bars he’d found in the city, including one called Lu Pao, in Chinatown, that was hilarious.

RB met us up and we ran around the city, checked out his place since it was right downtown, and went to a couple other bars, one of which had a house drink that was full of bourbon and gross. But we finished it anyway.