Let the travelling begin...

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Finally, after forever and a day, the day had arrived when we would hand over the keys to the flat, pick up the rental car and leave Auckland to start our travels. However, all had not been rosy in the preceeding weeks...

Ever since the second week of December, both Corina and I had suffered illnesses that had kept us off work, off alcohol and off pretty much everything apart from the toilet and the phone to the doctor. I'd missed all but the last day of the last week in work with bad gastro issues, and from that day for nearly two weeks I had chest problems, the worst part was that I couldn't drink and be merry over christmas or really celebrate the end of 8 months of hard office slog.

By the time the 27th had come around, we'd packed and got everything ready, and despite still feeling unwell, I decided not to go back to the doctors just yet and we set about getting out of Auckland, however, everything was not going to go smoothly...

We were due to pick up the car from ace rentals at 1pm, before taking it back to the flat, packing our stuff in it, meeting the landlord at 2, handing over the keys and disappearing into the sunset. However, for a number of reasons, ace rentals didn't have enough cars to meet requirements, so we were told to come back later, but the car they had found for us hadn't been returned, and we were faced with taking all of our stuff into a hostel for a night and seeing what happens, but around 3 pm we got a call from the rental company saying our car had turned up. We were ready to go.

We packed, said goodbye to our flat, had a wander around Emily Place, then set-off to start our trip.

We'd intended to go to Papamoa on our first trip, but they were all booked out, so we'd gone for the bigger town up the road in the Bay of Plenty, Tauranga.

As mentioned before, we were going to live in Tauranga, taking up work in the Kiwi fruit industry back in April, but a few rum and cokes in Rotorua whilst waiting for our bus transfer made us change our mind and go to Auckland.

The drive to Tauranga was relatively straight-forward, we got slightly confused by the Google map directions and ended up ignoring them and following the road signs. We got to the Silver Birch holiday park in good time, and put up our tent for the first time in pitch number 4 which was right down by the harbourside just a few feet from the water. Despite our naievty in such matters, we managed to put up the tent without any fuss and settled down to watch the beautiful sunset, very pleased with ourselves after a tough, stressfull day.

We'd finally done it - left our jobs, flat and the grip of Auckland to go travelling. We were free again. As we watched the sunset from our camping chairs overlooking the waterside we both agreed that this is what we were waiting for, and we were both eager to get going the next day, when we planned to go into Taurange and see what it had to offer.

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Photos

Camping by the waterside
Our tent site was precariously close to the water to manouvure the car, but we were happy.

Our new home
After the Leigh disaster, we were very happy with our new tent.