Bye Sweet JucyVan

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Goat Island and Auckland, Bye to Jucy Day 74
December 14, 2008

We woke up to gray skies, but no rain. No matter, the morning was spent cleaning out the van and giving away salt, pepper, butter, and laundry detergent. We managed to eat all the food we had in the van so little was wasted. The beach here at Paihia started getting lively early with people swimming and little kids running around. We weren’t very eager to leave.

I thought we were done with dirt roads (they called them “shingle” roads here) but I inadvertently led us on one last adventure going the back way to Goat Island. Goat Island is a marine preserve where we were going to snorkel, but when we got there we decided the water was too cold. We could see quite a few large fish just by standing on the rocks looking in the water. There were plenty of other people enjoying the area picnicking, snorkeling and scuba diving.

From Goat Island it was a two-hour drive to Auckland. We drove around downtown and the wharf area for a bit and even on a Sunday there were quite a few people out and about.

We had no trouble finding our way to the Jucy Company downtown and we were surprised to find that the two young men working there were from Ohio and California. They had time to talk and wanted to know about our trip since they hadn’t been in NZ very long. One wanted to know where else we thought he should go to work. We suggested Queenstown, since it seemed that in that town there wasn’t anybody over 40. I was very relieved that we drove about 7000 kilometers in NZ without having a dent or chip in the windshield.

We arrived at our hotel before five and I was happy to see a large modern room with a bathtub. We decided to do absolutely nothing tonight. I walked down the hall to the hotel restaurant and brought back Cesar salads for us. Joe wasn’t too happy about the poached egg on top of his salad.

As we near the end of the trip, I can’t help but feel sad. Joe is reading the newspaper and just now said there are round trip tickets from Auckland to Fiji for $350 U.S. Sure is tempting to just forget about the return ticket to CA and keep traveling.

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Photos

Auckland
I took this from our moving van on the harbor bridge. You can bungy jump off the sky tower if you like and want to pay the $125.