Well I made it into New Zealand yesterday evening, and got here just in time to see an incredible sunset to usher me into a new country. And as soon as I arrived at the hostel, my adventure began, as only fitting for Jeff Stafford in a new country all alone. So I met my hostel mates, 3 guys from the UK, and after a good 3 minutes we became old friends and decided to head down to the pub for a beer, around 7:06pm. We walked in and noticed the entire pub was full of guy and girls dressed up as doctors, nurses, and random camo outfits, and after being in the pub for about 3 minutes as well, and my total time in Auckland bordering half an hour, I went up to the table and sat down with these people and struck up a conversation, and turns out they were all local people from Auckland having a going away party for Charlie, and they were doing a "pub crawl", traveling around to different pubs. Roughly 7:10pm at this point. Around 7:11 I was invited to join them, so at 7:17 I commenced out of the pub and followed them to their private bus and found out as we left that I was going to a different city, and ended up travelling for 1.5 hours with 30 strangers on a charter bus to a town called Hamilton where we went to a few clubs and continued the Crawl. I ended up getting home finally around 4:00am after all our stops, and couldn't help but laugh every couple minutes all night long as I looked around and took in the fact that I am on a different continent with total strangers on a bus going to a different city, and somehow it was not the slightest bit awkward, and just fit. They were a great group of people, and they absolutely loved the fact that I was just some random dude from Texas on their bus celebrating Charlie's goodbye party and the fact that I don't know Charlie. Solid gold.

I am just hanging around Auckland today and will go to my orientation tomorrow, then probably head out to Christchurch on the south island in the next couple days, so stay tuned, we'll see what comes my way next....