We figured this day would be the last day to do things together, because Dave's flight left at 2:30pm the next day. As it turned out, Dave's flight was delayed, and so we departed on the same flight on Day 13.

At any rate, for all the time we had spent in Auckland, we hadn't really seen the city itself. So Day 11 was consumed by shopping around the city. We went to two music shops, where Dave tried out some guitars, and then we went to the biggest honkin' used book store ever. The store was basically just an old house turned into a bookstore. Used books were heaped EVERYWHERE. It was a labyrinthine tangle of narrow walkways, creaky staircases, and towering bookcases. I couldn't even get a sense for how the place was laid out, because books were obscuring the views in all directions, and all the multiple sets of stairs were confusing. Even the areas beneath the staircases were renovated into trangular-shaped sets of bookshelves. Stacks of books were heaped on top of all the bookcases and the floor in front of them, because there wasn't enough room on the shelves. One bookcase per genre? No, one ROOM per genre. One of many neat things about looking around that place was that we recognized a lot of book titles but not their covers. It's standard practice for a book to be realized with one cover in the United States and other covers in other countries.

From there we went to a little takeaway shop, this one with tables, to eat. I tried a steak and egg cheeseburger, and it would have been good if there hadn't been onions all mixed up in it. Plus I didn't get any beetroot!

Then we went to a quaint little plaza where souvenir shops were huddled up against each other and canopies were set up over vendors in the center of the plaza. We picked up some souvenirs and then moved on to a couple of saddlery shops.

Beach

Of COURSE we went to a beach. There were wooden posts lining the parking lot, to keep cars from driving on the grass and sand, so naturally I had to hop from one to another. They were spaced fairly far apart, so most leaps required a running start, which meant you had to be just coming off the previous post to make the next one.

This beach had some interesting cave-like formations in the rock, and the waves were intermittently racing through the entryways, so the challenge here was to time one's movements just right so as to avoid getting wet.

However, that still wasn't enough climbing. Somehow Dave and I lost Darleen and Brunnen-G, so we hunted around for them. When we didn't find them, we figured they were on top of the steep hill, thick with grass and brush and scattered clumps of trees, but getting to the path up the hill required going part way around it first.

So Dave and I figured we'd climb up the short way. This meant climbing straight up a seemingly vertical grass slope, then plowing into some shrubbery and young trees and the occasional brambles. We crested one rise only to find another, and then we crested that only to find another, and eventually we realized we weren't going to make it to the part of the hill they were on. But it was neat up there. To our left, through some very thick and pretty much innavigable waist-deep brush, the ground dropped so steeply down that the grove of trees at the bottom had leap canopies that touched the ground on our level. It looked like we could walk straight across the bit of ground we were on, then step onto the tops of the trees and keep going.

So we gave up and returned to the parking lot, where Darleen was waiting to tell us that she and Brunnen-G had been looking all over for us. But we were looking for you, I said, and the upshot was that I ended up going up the hill (the proper way this time!) anyway, to find Brunnen-G and assure her we were not dead.

Dave and I never made it to that part of the hill, but Darleen and Brunnen-G had been looking at an Australasian Gannet colony, including several young ones, from not very far away.

Valentine's...

...is a chain buffet restaurant that Puck treated us all out to. Apparently one Valentine's is often very different from another; the one we went to is the only one Puck or Brunnen-G particularly like. It was great. The first thing you see when you walk into the dining room is a huge margarine sculpture of a mermaid. (A plaque behind it had the name of the artist and gave some information about it: the type of margarine is a special type that holds its shape at room temperature, so the sculpture only has to be replaced every six months or so.) There were soups and salads and casseroles and breads and chicken, beef, fish, and lamb; fruit, insufficiently sweetened desserts, and one INSANELY oversweetened dessert that was -- get this -- EVEN TOO SWEET FOR LEEN. It was all delicious, and it's a good thing that place isn't in southern New Hampshire, or we'd be eating there all the time.

The Sky Tower

The Sky Tower is Auckland's most recognizable landmark. It is the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, and it's shaped roughly like a hypodermic needle. You can't go all the way up; as I say, it's shaped roughly like a hypodermic needle. It's too skinny at the top to have convenient public access up there.

But you can get pretty high. A glass elevator takes you up to the viewing areas. Leen and Dave stayed far away from the glass, while Brunnen-G and I made sure we stood RIGHT AGAINST it.

At the top, there are three floors right in a row: from the bottom up, there is a rotating restaurant, so patrons can get a revolving view out the windows, the indoor viewing area, and the outdoor viewing area. We went to the indoor viewing area first. The indoor viewing area, like the other three floors up there, are single circular rooms that go all the way around the building. The stairs and elevators are in the very center. The outer wall is all window; the window starts at the base of the floor, then slopes up and out until it joins the ceiling. Leen and Dave stayed as close to the inside wall as they could. The rest of us walked around the outside. It was nighttime, and the view was beautiful. We had seen Auckland in the daytime from Un-Tree Hill; this was a new spectacle: little lights everywhere, extending to the horizon, with bare patches were there were hills, like Un-Tree Hill, or water.

The thing about walking around the outside of the viewing area was that there were 3x4 foot glass panes in the floor. (The restaurant floor underneath is narrower in diameter, so beneath the glass panes was the very long drop to the ground.)

I am not afraid of heights. Well, I am afraid of heights to a degree that most people are -- enough to pay heights due respect but not enough so that I can't do things that aren't suicidally stupid. But I had to brace myself every time before I could step out onto one of those panes of glass. A sign said how thick the glass was and how it was every bit as strong as the concrete part of the floor, but even so, it was difficult for me to walk on those things without extending my arms and testing the glass first before putting my weight on it. As we walked around, it got easier to step onto the glass panels, but I hadn't gotten to the point where I could walk over them nonchalantly. And Brunnen-G says it's worse in the daytime, because you can't see the glass as well. It looks like you're just walking out over an open hole. I sort of wish we had gone up in the daytime, but I'm also glad we got to see that view of Auckland at night.

The other thing we did, which was much easier, was to lean over the glass panes that made up the outer wall. As I said, the glass panes were sloped outward, so the diameter of the ceiling was bigger than the diameter of the floor. Leaning against the glass wall meant all that was beneath you was the ground. Still scarier, to anyone who has even an average person's respect for heights, is leaning against the glass BACKWARDS, with your head facing up. To many, looking up is scarier than looking down. Brunnen-G and I made ourselves queasy but we did it. We continued to take turns thinking up scary things to do to ourselves. Survival instincts make for a lot of excitement sometimes.

The outdoor level also had an outer wall made of glass, starting right at the base of the floor, but this time the glass was completely vertical, and there were no glass panes in the floor. The ceiling was a wire mesh that sloped from the glass wall up and in to the center column with the stairs and elevators in it. Through the mesh, if you were close enough to the outer rim, you could see the top of the tower further up. The mesh, I assume, was to guard against idiots throwing anything off the tower. Even a simple little thing like a pencil could be deadly from that height. In spite of the glass wall, there was a lot of brisk wind up there.

Brunnen-G's challenge for that floor was to start at the inside and run *backward* into the glass. That was VERY difficult. The glass panes in the floor made me queasier, but running backwards toward the edge of the tower was harder to do. We kept peeking and/or slowing down and/or putting our hands behind us before we hit the glass. After SEVERAL tries, I finally did manage it, and shortly thereafter Brunnen-G did also. Dave not only couldn't do it, he couldn't watch us do it. Leen never did get comfortable up there no matter how close to the inside she was. I have just enough of a queasiness about heights to sympathize with the feeling. I could NEVER have been on the construction team that built that tower. I looked at all the things on the outer section of the tower -- for example, the flood lights, positioned a bit out from the tower so they could illuminate it, had to be fastened into place by an actual person. There is NO way I could have been that person. NONE. If I somehow found myself out there, I'd have just wrapped both arms and legs around the most solid thing I could find and whimpered until somebody built a suspension bridge just underneath me so I could step off and walk away.

Sky City

The complex at the base of the Sky Tower is called Sky City. It's a rather beautifully decorated and spacious couple of floors of ritzy stuff. There were mezzanines and big fancy waterfall/fountain displays and so forth. Among the attractions in Sky City is a casino. Darleen and I had never been in a casino before, so we nosed around. We lost some money in the slot machines for fun. Brunnen-G actually came out ahead a few dollars. Then we wandered around the roulette tables and watched the lightning fast dealing at the blackjack tables.

Just outside the casino was a vending machine where you could buy packs of cards that had been used in the casino. So I bought a few decks. (I collect playing cards.) They all had a hole punched in them, so you couldn't then wander into the casino and cheat with them. This is standard practice for selling used casino decks in the U.S. also.

That night, we set things up for a group photo, and after much positioning and posing, we got it.

Birds

16 total: House Sparrow, New Zealand Pigeon, Rock Dove, Red-Billed Gull, Black-Backed Gull, Myna, Australasian Gannet, Silvereye, White-Fronted Tern, Paradise Shelduck, Pukeko, Welcome Swallow, Mallard, Black Swan, Harrier, Feral Goose.