Blogs from Ponsonby, Auckland, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 2

Pete came and picked me up bright and early to get to the drag races. We had to drive an hour out of Auckland to a place called Meremere where the races were being held at a race track. There were tons of cars there already when we got there at 9:30am. Parked the car and headed over to the track. We stood near the starting point where the cars do 10-15 seconds of burnouts to warm up their tires so they stick to the road better. Then the 2 cars line up side by side and wait for the green light and race down the track. It was really cool to see. Some of the cars were really old but you could tell they have new souped up motors in them. Some cars were top ... read more

Well, after much debate in my head and heart I have decided to quit searching for a job here in New Zealand and am now focusing my time on heading to Australia a month early. Jobs are few and far between here and I've gotten plenty of rejection letters lately. I feel like it's time to move on and start something new again. I've let all my Aussie friends know my plans and they all seem just as excited as I am. I found a cheap flight to Melbourne on June 29th and will leave New Zealand then. My friend Dorothy who worked at OCH with me came up from Christchurch to Auckland on her way to Samoa. I spent a couple of days with her catching up and then she went off to Samoa. Another ... read more

"Behind us lay the whole of America and everything I had previously known about life... We had finally found a magic land at the end of the road and we never had dreamed the extent of the magic." Jack Kerouac - On the Road The Meaning of Life Jack may have found his “magic” in the 1950s classic On the Road, but I’m still searching for mine after 5,500k on The Beast of Burden. That’s not to say it’s been a fruitless journey, I’ve found out quite a bit about myself. It's All About Me For example, I’ve learnt that I can be quite chatty, and the natural reserve I have when meeting strangers is often replaced now by a more outgoing manner. I even initiate conversation. It may seem a strange thing to learn and ... read more

LUCKY YOU!! You may have been invited to, or worse still, stumbled across another of these self indulgant 21st century buckets of literary tripe. Fancy us thinking anyone would want to know what minor little interlude we have planned for 2010, when you all have such exciting and more important things going on in your own busy lives. However, the mother in law was insistent, so I guess what the MIL wants, she gets!! So, if you have a few minutes, or even more likely, have absolutely nothing else to do, here goes. Frances is one of those women, who occasionally astounds me with her trust and co-operation. Around 10 months ago, I turned to her, over a wine one Friday evening, and straight between the eyes hit her with "honey I need an adventure. We ... read more

So our blogs seems to have stopped whilst we started to make ourselves comfortable in Auckland New Zealand. We had trouble with our flights from Sydney to Auckland too. The bimbo who booked our flights issued us with a paper ticket not an electronic one and so the company we were flying with would not let us board the plane. We had had enough at this point and so decided to not waste more time and money going back to Sydney city and bought tickets at the airport for the next available flight. Once we arrived in Auckland we hoped on a shuttle bus and picked a random hostel in the city to stay in for the night. We picked one named surf and snow and it was uncomfortable and bear. The next day we checked ... read more