Road Trip to the Bay of Islands

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Once we'd managed to hot wire Jayn's car we were on the road early morning to Bay of Islands, only kidding of course we had permission and we filled it up with "the green one." Left the house around 8.30am with our picnic and 1st stop was Whangarei Falls - described as the Paris Hilton of waterfalls, the the most photographed falls but not the most impressive!....150km North of Auckland, 26m high. Graham and John had mentioned some famous toilets on route to Bay of Islands but didn't really take note, but we saw the signs and pulled over! It is New Zealands most famous public toilets, they were interesting...and yes got a photo! Lol. You just have to play tourist sometimes don't cha?! It is called the Hundertwasser toilet block in KawaKawa. We were planning to go to Russell for the day and had looked up a nice beach but didn't realise we had to get a ferry over so saw Russell from afar and headed to Paihia. Finished our picnic first on the beach in Okiato, just pulled over from the road. Bay of Islands were beautiful as they were revealed from the hilly roads, I was thinking Whitsundays, not quite but still pretty. Found a nice grassy spot to sunbathe in Paihia and fell asleep and then got burnt.....bad times. Only on my bum! But you don't wanna know! Very painful even today! Sleeping hurts! Aloe Vera is in the fridge and is rapidly going down! But anywho topped up the tan which had vanished due to the rainy south island! A few hours later we thought we'd better go and see KeriKeri as this is where Dan's aunt and uncle are moving to from Adelaide. We know that we'll be back this way again so we can spend more time at the Bay of Islands then and of course we'll have to pay Jayn another visit in years to come.

Kerikeri seemed nice, took it all in and was nice to see where Doug & Linda were moving too. Grabbed another pizza hut and then drove back to Jayns! All in one day! We'd done well! Got back around 9pm, we had planned to stay up at Bay of Islands in the car overnight but we weren't overly keen! So great success!

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