Day 20 - Heading home

On our way to the airport, we stopped to watch a cricket match.

I dont get this game at all. 

We slept in until 8:15am.  This was the latest we slept the whole trip because we always were so excited to get out the door explore.  We headed out to check out the beach and went for a walk along it. Watched the surfers and swimmers it was in the high 70s but windy.  On the way, we stopped for my final savory scone and flat white.
Ironically, when we were on our way to return our rental car Matt turned onto the wrong side of the road for the first time of the entire trip.  It was a little scary as there was a car coming but he recovered well.  Our rental car return gave us more reasons to love this place.  They found some scratches on the front bumper.  We honestly hadn't looked the car over when we picked it up and had know idea how we would have gotten scratches on it.  The worker said she had to show her manager.  I'm thinking, oh great, they'll look and see that we didn't get the extra insurance and make a big hassle out of this.  The manager came out, looked at the scratches and said oh we can buff those out.  No worries, Mate.  That so would not have gone down like that at an American rental car place.  I heart NZ.
Our flight back took us to Auckland and then onto San Fran.  The flight was way more crowded than on the way there but it was 3 days before Christmas so that made sense.  The landing in San Fran caused Matt to declare we will never fly in to that airport again (I'll just say that many folks utilized their air sickness bags so it was pretty bad).  We had a bit of a layover and then headed back to Portland where it was dark, cloudy and rainy at 4:30pm.  Home sweet home:-)  Next time I'll post some funny new zealand-isms we learned and my final thoughts on the trip.