Honeymoon Day 1 - Arrival and Auckland

Welcome to our newly minted travel blog! Our first stop is of course New Zealand, from which we arrived home a few weeks ago. While New Zealand is a pain in the butt to get to, it was certainly worth it, and made for a phenomenal honeymoon. We began our trip around 6:30 Friday night, with a nice sunset out the window of the plane at RDU. We had ahead of us a 6 hour flight to Los Angeles, and from there another 13 hour flight to Auckland, NZ. Though 13 hours is a long time to spend in any plane, we were fortunate at least to get to spend it in one of Boeing's newest planes, the 787 Dreamliner. We noticed almost immediately how much quieter the Dreamliner is, which apparently is due to a number of things including the plane being made out of composite rather than metal, and the shape of the engines, which allows for a quieter plane overall. Another interesting feature that we didn't notice right away (to our credit it was 2AM Raleigh time when we boarded the flight) were...