In case you missed it from my previous… nine blog posts, I spent the last week and a half exploring New Zealand with my friend Doug Wreden.

We originally went on the trip to fulfill an inside joke among his live streaming community as a reward for achieving a stretch goal of over half a million dollars raised for charity during Doug’s annual fundraising event supporting the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation. One of the jokes was to go purchase Burberry Hero cologne; the other was to be a tourist at the Auckland aquarium, on theme with the ocean conservation efforts of the Foundation.

While on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, we decided to fit in some more activities in addition to visiting the aquarium—namely, doing a coast-to-coast walk across Auckland (and, in the process, climbing Mount Eden and One Tree Hill), descending into the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, venturing across Tūrangi, walking around the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, and checking out the New Zealand Maritime Museum, all while eating a bunch of food.

Our time in New Zealand has now come to an end, and we just flew back to the United States. Because of the drastic time zone difference, we left New Zealand during the afternoon and landed back in the United States the morning of the same day. Our flight back… was interesting.

Throughout the trip, Doug and I vaguely split most of the expenses, but the travel costs themselves were almost entirely covered by Doug, i.e., he paid out-of-pocket for both of our premium economy seats. Premium economy on long international flights are different than shorter domestic flights—on domestic flights, you usually just get a little bit of extra leg room, but on international flights, premium economy comes with noticeably larger seats (with more width, pitch, and legroom) with footrests. The point is, they’re already pretty nice.

However, I know that there are even nicer and shinier business class seats further up in the front of the plane. Unfortunately, upgrading to business class would’ve been an additional ~US$4,000.00 per person, and considering that we had already spent thousands of dollars on our premium economy seats, it didn’t seem practical to pay for business class seats. Unless…

Air New Zealand has this interesting feature called OneUp™ where you can bid for discounted seats in a higher class that hadn’t been purchased. This piqued my interest, because it meant that we might be able to fly in business class without spending an additional ~US$8,000.00. I started doing some research on travel forums to see the optimal bid amount for upgrades between Los Angeles and Auckland.

Considering that Doug had purchased both of our tickets, I thought it would be reasonable to spend my own money to pay for our upgrades. I put in a bid for US$640.00 per person per leg, for a total of US$2,560.00. If this got accepted, we would be getting business class upgrades for a ~68% discount. Unfortunately, the business class cabin was full on the way to Auckland, so my bid was declined for our outbound flight… but luckily, my bid did get accepted for our inbound flight back to the United States.

Because of our upgrade, we got to enjoy priority check-in and express security, then relax at the Air New Zealand Auckland International Lounge before our flight. I’m a Priority Pass member so I’ve been to a lot of these before, but this was Doug’s first time in an airport lounge. He brought back and enjoyed a plate containing a gigantic mound of broccoli from the lounge buffet, then took a shower in the lounge so that he can say he has showered in an airport before.

The lounge had a nice view of the gates from its floor-to-ceiling windows.

Air New Zealand’s business class cabin is… strange, to say the least. I have never seen a business class cabin in this layout where everyone is basically all facing into the aisle and looking at each other. Fortunately, I looked up some YouTube videos of Air New Zealand’s Boeing 777-300s ahead of time and found this out, so when we reserved our seats, I made sure to grab seats in the 12th and final row of business class by the bulkhead and curtain so that we would have as much privacy as possible and everyone else in business class wouldn’t be staring at the back of our heads the entire flight.

Once we boarded, we got some beverages as pre-departure service.

Because of the angle of the seats, looking out the window was difficult; I had to turn my body about 120° to the right to snap this photograph of the tarmac.

After a short half-hour departure delay, we took off from Auckland Airport.

Meal service began right around an hour into the flight. We started with an amuse-bouche of confit potato with onion crème fraîche whip and chives.

As the appetizer, I was served crayfish bisque with chive crème fraîche and croutons. I also received a side of garlic bread and a roll.

Hello, Douglas Douglas.

As my main entrée, I opted to get seared New Zealand snapper with escabeche vegetables, smoked mussels, white beans, and fresh dill.

For dessert, I had warmed pear pudding with ginger caramel and spiced custard sauce.

After finishing our meal, we discovered an app on our in-flight entertainment system called SeatChat. Prior to using the app, you had to accept their terms of service, which explicitly stated that the platform should not be used for inappropriate communications. Of course, Doug’s very first message after sending the initial invite message immediately breached the terms of service by implying that there is a bomb.

For the past few weeks, my friend Billie-Rae has been insistent that I should play World of Warcraft in random and irrelevant places out in public. The thing is, I can’t play World of Warcraft unless I am at my desk setup because all my games are installed on an external SSD that I plug into my dock, into which I plug my laptop.

Regardless, I decided to feed into her joke by whipping out my laptop on the plane and using in-flight wifi to go on Google Images and search for “World of Warcraft gameplay” so I could take this photo and make it look like I was gaming at 33,000 feet in altitude. I sent it to her and managed to trick her for a few seconds, even though the screenshot I picked was terrible because it had black bars around the edges that I didn’t notice at the time.

Afterwards, I put away my laptop and asked the flight attendant to assist with converting my seat into lie-flat mode so I could go to sleep for the night.

… I only got an hour and a half of sleep. Not because the bed was uncomfortable or anything; in fact, this was probably the most comfortable lie-flat seat I’ve ever experienced on a plane.

The reason I couldn’t sleep is because THE WOMAN IN THE SEAT NEXT TO ME KEPT FARTING, AND IT SMELLED SO BAD THAT THE STENCH WOKE ME UP EVERY TIME I FELL ASLEEP.

Anyway, good morning. With about two and a half hours left to go on the flight, breakfast service started.

To start, I was served a croissant…

… some granola with milk and apple juice…

… and a fruit bowl with strawberry, pineapple, cantaloupe, melon, and orange.

My main entrée was banana waffles with roasted apple, boysenberry yogurt, and apple cinnamon butter.

After just shy of 12 hours travel time, we made it back to the United States and landed in foggy Los Angeles.

This was an unexpectedly nice trip. At first, I approached this as more of an obligation rather than a vacation, but after Doug and I started planning our activities, I realized it could actually be pretty enjoyable. Once I got there and started adventuring, it was very pleasant. The business class upgrade on our return flight obviously added a memorable luxurious touch to the conclusion, but even without it, New Zealand was a good experience.