Garnering Opinions

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! I finally rid myself of that nasty cold and am back into my regular exercise routine. Well, sort of. Jake is on travel this week which means I'm doing more jogging with Dublin outside. I've really been liking the treadmill as of late. Don't ask me why or how, but I've been all about it. Anyway, we saw some snowfall on Saturday but nothing that stuck around. It'll be back up to 65-degrees by Thursday when Jake gets back. We spent a lot of time relaxing this weekend, it was pretty nice.

So to the point of this post. I need opinions. We had all intentions of booking our flights to New Zealand for this weekend but we hit a snag. We have two decent options and are having a hard time deciding which is best. My question thus is, what would you do?

Option 1: Leave on Friday, fly from Dulles to L.A. via United and then L.A. to Auckland via Air New Zealand (12-hour flight). This option would have us arriving in Auckland around 8:00AM on Sunday morning. On the return we would leave Saturday (two weeks later) mid-morning, return through L.A. and arrive early Saturday evening at Dulles.

Option 2: Leave on Saturday, fly from Dulles to L.A. via Virgin Atlantic, L.A. to Brisbane, Australia via V Australia (14 hours) and then Brisbane to Auckland via Pacific Blue (3 hours). This option would have us arriving in Auckland between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon on Monday. On the return we would leave Monday mid-morning, take the same 3 flights back, and arrive at Dulles early evening Monday (and have to work on Tuesday). Here's the clincher, this option would save us enough money to cover the entire cost of a rental car in NZ for the 2 weeks. It's approximately 22% less.

Sooooo... yeah we're not sure which way to go. I understand that after being on a 14-hour flight the last thing we are probably going to want to do is get on another plane for 3 hours. Also any extra connections mean another chance for our bags to get lost, particularly since the last leg is a local carrier. We have no idea what the situation in Brisbane will be with regards to security/customs since we are connecting. On the other hand the savings is pretty significant for what is going to be a kind of expensive trip to begin with (our last hurrah for a while). Since Virgin only flies on certain days this also altered our itinerary to give us an extra day, however, if there are issues and we miss the long haul flight from Brisbane to L.A. we could really be stuck. I keep wondering, is it worth the risk? How much is my time worth? How much is my sanity worth? Ugh.

So with all honesty, dear readers, let me know what you would do, because I am at a total loss. So far I have two votes for option 1 and one completely undecided.