Ready to go again

---

We had decided that we would give the backpacker's car market another 3 day run to sell the van, so I headed down there this morning to pay for this. When I got there, they said that despite charging the van up, it had not been able to start so they were going to get someone from across the street at the garage to come and look at it. They figured it was likely just a fuse and not too major. They also told me someone was interested in buying it and had taken down our phone number. This was encouraging, but as I had not got a call I wasn't too hopeful.

I left and walked back up towards the hostel, partially to check out other car repair places in case the one near the car market tried to hose us on the price. While walking I got a call. It turned out to be a German guy who was interested in buying the car. This was good news. We arranged to meet back there around noon.

When I got back to the hostel around 10, they hostel staff was knocking on the door to our room. They had it booked for tonight and we were going to have to go. We had asked them to pencil us in and to let us know if they were in doubt, but somehow this message didn't get passed through. They said that they would see what they could do, and we did a mad quick pack-up. Just as we were finishing the hostel manager Brenden came and said that he had managed to do some rearranging and we could stay. Disaster averted.

We are all settling in to the hostel a bit more and make more use of the public areas. It feels a bit less claustrophobic than when we were hanging out mostly in our room. The kids settle in to the couches and watch The Simpson's with the twenty something backpacker set.

Around noon Evy and I headed down to meet up with our potential customer. The car market people told me that they garage had fixed the problem so this was a relief. We met the buyer (a German guy who is about 30) and agreed on a price (at this point we just want to get it sold). As he can only put a certain amount on his card per day, he made a deposit and we agreed to meet tomorrow to finish up the deal.

This was an enormous relief, though the transaction is not completely finished, Evy and I were quite relieved. After a quiet afternoon at the hostel, we phoned a travel medicine clinic to find out about getting the drug Dukoral for our southeast Asia travels. It turned out they could give us an appointment right away. We raced down there and spent half and hour filling out multiple forms, some with the same information. In the end, we all got Twinrex injection and took a course of Dukoral (lovely foaming drink) along with another dose to take in a week.

Joshua seems obsessed with the idea of doing a bungy jump, and insisted on stopping at one place on the way. Fortunately, nothing came of it. After returning to the hostel, we gave the Catherine and Kerry Dye a call. They are friends of the Peter Ketchums at the cottage and have been kindly corresponding with us. We explained our plans to travel to the Hot Sands beach area over the next week. They invited us to come to dinner on our last night in Auckland next week.

We ate dinner and settled in for an evening watching Jurassic Park on the computer.

---