And We're off!

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Happy New Year! We arrived in Auckland safely and have had a few days to settle into travel mode. Spent New Year's here and watched some good fireworks over the Sky Tower. After getting over our jet lag we headed up north to the Bay of Islands where we had a jet boat tour out to the famous "hole in the rock," we got a few mouthfulls of saltwater along the way but saw some great scenery. The next day we headed up to the northern most part of NZ called Cape Reinga, where you can supposedly see the meeting of the two oceans (although one is a sea if you are getting technical) the Tasman and the Pacific. Unfortunately when we were there we could only hear the meeting of the two oceans, as we were stuck right in some heavy fog, and couldn't even see the water that was 100 feet below. All was not lost however, as the sun came out for some sand boarding down massive dunes, and a nice drive along 90 mile beach. Not much else to report, back in Auckland today and heading south tomorrow, but wanted to get the blog started while we had some free time. We will try to keep it updated as often as possible, and would like to hear from everyone back home once in a while too so drop us an email! By for now,

Joe and Hawley

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