Nadi, Fiji

Day 2 of our four-day transit back home, today from Auckland to Nadi.

Our flight was at 9:30am so we decided to get through all the airport lineups and then have breakfast in the terminal.

We had a little wrinkle cause we only had a one-way ticket to Nadi (our flight to Toronto was part our return ticket from Toronto to Nadi). So we we couldn’t checkin online, and instead had to go through a couple longer lineups to show proof of on-going voyage. It was pretty crowded so we wore our masks the whole time, including the flight.

The exit immigration process was fully automated. We’re dreading having to go through Pearson in a few days, which is the opposite of the experience here.

The flight was really pleasant on Air New Zealand. We got totally engrossed in our movies (Elvis for Heather, Tenet for me) and neither of us realized we had even taken off until we were about to land. Perfect movie lengths for a three hour flight!

Cause I booked our flights so many months ago I was able to book seats near the front of economy, and so we were first off the plane and first through immigration. Good thing cause there were only a couple agents and slow going.

Got a taxi to the DoubleTree. We’d taken the route a half dozen times during our Fiji leg of the trip and it was very familiar to us.

About half the staff at the DoubleTree recognized us, some of them even remembered our names which was really impressive, given the number of guests they encounter.

It was 1pm and our room wasn’t quite ready, so we had lunch while waiting. The downside was that we were still in our cooler weather clothes and it was 29C here. Oh well.

We were reunited with our left luggage and took a golf cart to our bure. The rest of the afternoon we spent rejigging our luggage yet again, this time with carryon for our overnight in San Francisco. We had our carryon suitcase now so had more room (on the flight here, our carryon was our weekend pack).

Had dinner yet again at the Doubletree. They had just changed menus so we had some new items to try. We both had fish dishes, both of which were walu, a common fish for eating here in Fiji. I also had a couple Fiji Bitters :)