Dawn broke just before 7AM along the Port in Auckland. The hustle of the streets below was muted from our 12th floor room. Life slowly crept out of the bedrooms of the apartment. We formulated a plan to head up to our next destination of Russell, a small island town in the Northland region. We fired up our newly acquired GPS, christened "Gertrude" by Ivy. With the aid of our Australian-accented electronic dame, we would be able to navigate New Zealand with ease. We set our sites on the Goat Island Marine Reserve, about an hour north along the Hibiscus Coastal Scenic Drive. The Reserve was the first of its kind, established in 1975 to protect and preserve a region of coastline and about 1500 hectares of the Pacific Ocean. We arrived without incident and surveyed
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