The brunch was as much fun as it was delicious! Everyone got a Christmas cracker (British rradition that we picked up on our first trip to London – you can buy them at World Market – please google if you are not familiar) We got little gifts (tape measure, marbles, etc) and had fun with the jokes and riddles. Everyone also got a different colored crown – which is why you’ll see Ryan and me wearing green and yellow crowns (respectively) for the rest of the day. I learned a fun fact from Heather about playing board games when she was younger. I always used the yellow game piece in every game and for a long time Heather thought yellow was my favorite color. Wasn’t until years later that she realized that I just let everyone pick first and yellow was also left over.

Having never been been to tea, it was a learning experience. We had the choice of about a dozen types of tea and everyone received their own personal (read ‘small’) ceramic teapot with tea leaves and two cups of water. Once you drank the tea, you could ask for more water – as I learned, the leaves were really good for one refill on water, not two – oops). We have two three-level towers of food which included finger sandwiches and Caesar Salad shooters” – which was a tiny cut-up salad is a tall shotglass. You didn’t want to drink it all at once – crunching stuff – but a need concept. In addition to the tower, there  were buffets of both savories and sweets in all shapes and sizes. After two hours of eating and drinking (that was the limit – really), we took photos of a model of the hotel made of gingerbread and then took family photos in front a giant wreath.

In the category of things you joke about and don’t actually do (which was a really good idea), Ryan and I decided not to go to the children’s area to decorate anatomically collect gingerbread people.

Time for a long walk to work on brunch. First stop was Auckland’s Skytower. We rode the elevator to the observation tower on the 60th floor to get a view of the city and 80km in each diretion. Unfortunately the Skywalk (attached yourself to a metal track on a platform outside the viewing area and walk around the entire outside of the building 60 stories up) or the Skyjump (wire-guided controlled jump off the outside platform) were both closed for the day – darn! Both looked like a lot of fun (really).

While up the Skytower, we saw Auckland’s Lego Christmas Tree – that was our next stop. It was  a 20+ ft tree made of Lego (if you include the 4-foot base not made of Lego. I was very cool – included elves, Santa with a surf board, large (4-foot) candy canes. Was made of more than a million Lego pieces – pretty cool!

Holly and I both need more steps to get to 10,000 for the day, so we walked to Albert Park, across the street from Frienz, the hostel where Ryan stayed before we arrived and then went in search of Mount Eden and One Tree Hill, two former volcanic craters in the city. We drove as close to the peaks of both and started walked. Our fitbits said we only climbed the equivalent of 37 flights of stairs, compared to more than 50 flights on the Puhio hike yesterday, but it was still a nice walk.

The highlight of the One Tree Hill walk was sheep! (and lots of them) grazing in the what was the volcanic crater. We estimated both craters using our Boy Scout measurement skills to be about 200 feet deep. Heather and I went is search of close up pictures walking through the sheep-poop obstacle course while Holly and Ryan made fun of us and made sheep sounds. Turns out that once we drove to the bottom of the hill, we could drive right up to the fence and get up close and personal with (well. not really, but closer to) the sheep. So when we come back, you’ll see lots (lots) of pictures ad videos of sheep.

Dinner was leftovers (for Heather and Ryan) or apples (for Holly and me) followed by a another Christmas tradition –  (mini in our case) mince pies. Delicious!!