We went to the famous Sky Tower. It's the tallest man-made structure in NZ and you can see an 360 view of the city from all around, including the Auckland Bridge. Auckland lies on and around an isthmus, so the view is just beautiful. I love watching the harbor and all of the activity going on there.
My favorite part was all of the volcanoes you can see surrounding the city. Auckland straddles a volcanic field that has produced approximately 50 volcanoes. They're all pretty much extinct, but the youngest one at 800 years old is Rangitoto. Hiking Rangitoto is on my "to do" list before I leave NZ.Interesting facts: the Sky Tower is as tall as 37 buses end-on-end and weighs as much as 6000 elephants. There were sections of glass on the floor that you could walk on and see below you.
We all walked around at the top of the tower for a while. You can do a harnessed jump from the top of the tower, so we watched a couple of people fly down to the bottom before heading down ourselves- but we all decided this was too weak for all of us experienced bungy jumpers. :)We all did our own thing for the rest of the day. Our foursome group hit up this amazing gelato shop called Giapo's. Best gelato I've ever had, and they had such creative flavors. I've decided I need to take advantage of these gelato excursions while I'm here.
We rode the bus back to Henderson around 4:3o and just hung out for the rest of the night. It's so nice to have these weekly breaks - and 3 day weekends!Saturday morning was Beau's baptism. It was so good - Beau was absolutely adorable. He's been looking forward to this for so long. The bishop had called me a couple of days ago and asked if I would give a talk on the Holy Ghost, and Jules asked if Mekelle and I would do a musical number. So I got to be pretty involved in the program. We roped Breanna and Ashley into singing with us too. There was such a good turn out to support him - around 40 people. He's such a special boy, you can't help but just love him. Afterward, everyone came back to the house and we had a little brunch with Jules' amazing pancakes (and hokey pokey ice cream, of course) and some other tasty food. It was really nice and quite a few people came over.
For the rest of the day, we "foursome" hung out with Paul, a YSA in one of our wards. He was so nice to take all of us around. At first we went to Western Park to listen to various kiwi artists that were performing. It was kind of lame, so we went to a mall and browsed around and got something to eat. Props to Paul - only guy among 4 girls at the mall......he was such a good sport. We sat at a table and chatted for a couple of hours and waited for another YSA friend, Derrick, to show up. We went to a few parks and played on some cool "flying foxes" (a.k.a. zip lines). It was fun - NZ has the coolest playgrounds. On the way home we stopped at some Chinese food shop downtown and a couple of people got deep-fried mars candy bars. I had a couple of bites. Talk about a heart attack in a bag. It ended up being a fun outing, and it was nice to get to know some YSA.As for Sunday, Breanna came to our ward with us. I loved it because I had a pal to go to Sunday School and Young Womens with. She's the best. It was sunny outside so we decided to go have class outside for Sunday school. We're YSA - we do pretty much whatever we want. Once we were outside, it was kind of breezy. And I realized that out of the 5 of us girls and 2 boys......all of us were wearing skirts. HAHA. When does that ever happen? A lot of the guys wear the traditional islander "skirts" for formal occasions - I can't remember what they are really called.
After church, we delighted in my very favorite - Jules' hot pancakes with hokey pokey ice cream. Absolutely heavenly! And she made them especially for us. :)
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