Well, this weekend proved to be more of an adventure than a mystery. The backstory is that I won an Air New Zealand Mystery Weekend for 2 people for 2 nights. I was asked to participate in an online discussion forum about FlyBuys & Air New Zealand Airpoints a few months ago. I made sure to tell them what I thought in detail and was given the mystery weekend for being the best contributor. I only had a few months to use it though, and most weekends were ruled out for one reason or another and so it came down to 12th, 13th & 14th of August.

One of the nicest things about going to Denarau Island is the number of great restaurants in all the resorts.

Stephen and I have taken two trips to Fiji now, and I haven’t posted about either of them. Both times we stayed at the Radisson resort on Denarau island, which is about a 20 minute drive from Nadi airport. Denarau is really more of a peninsula than an island, but they have dug a canal and built a bridge so that it technically qualifies as an island. It is home to half a dozen large fancy resorts which are along the ocean front on the west and north sides of the island. In order, they are the Worldmark timeshare resort, Radisson, Sheraton, Sheraton Villas, Westin, Sofitel & Hilton. You can walk from resort to resort around the beachfront or via the road. There is also a bus (the Bula bus) that runs around all the resorts and to the marina on the eastern side of the island. From the marina, you can get transfers out to the Mamanuca & Yasawa island (e.g. Mana Island, Plantation Island, Treasure Island etc). You can either stay at the resorts out there (more beautiful and more pricy), or you can just go for a day trip.

Stephen recently forced me to watch the first episode of Game of Thrones, based on the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. At first, I wasn’t convinced. It’s a medieval fantasy series with quite graphic sex and violence, and I’m generally a fan of things more reality-based. While Stephen was away I watched a few more episodes and started to get hooked on the characters. I started googling to find out more about the backstory of the characters and then decided I should probably just read the books.

I’m a big fan of Grabaseat deals, although I’ve still never managed to snag myself a $1 fare. The cheapest I got was a $18 fare to Hamilton which I needed to get enough status points to qualify for Air New Zealand Silver frequent flyer status. Normally grabaseat deals are the cheapest flights you can get either domestically or internationally. Not always though. Apparently sometimes you’re better off not taking the grabaseat deal:

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Games are commonly used in some introductory programming courses because they’re fun for students to create and they teach basic programming concepts just as effectively as creating other kinds of applications.

And no, I don’t mean we are stealing the neighbours wireless. (We have occasionally done that, but that’s not what this post is about.)