Advertisement
Published: January 20th 2008
Edit Blog Post
YAYAYAY! I have a buddy! 😊 Mason FINALLY arrived after about 3 days of travel 😉 Because of delays with luggage and rerouting, he arrived late on Saturday night, and of course I had a scotch on the rocks and bright smile waiting for him! At the Rendez-vous! Again, can't believe I found it, and good thing, the correct Ryan Mason arrived! 😊 The first thing he said as he looked out our window overlooking the city and the pool/gym was, "Awesome, look at that, do you want to go work out?" HA!~ So great to have him here!
We went out to dinner, and were pretty disappointed with the food creativity as well as the service...it actually became a common theme around NZ! Our best meals were made in a 3x2 kitchen in the Tron! Anyways, we were on the harbor in Auckland, so it was at least great scenery and company! We headed off to the -5C Ice bar, where you strapped on fur parkas, boots, and mittens in order to go into an all ice bar, even the glassware was made of ice! They had all these crazy rules, including one where we could only go inside
for 25 minutes for fear of freezing to death. Do the calculation - that's 23degrees F! HAHAHAHAHA! That's a Packer game in October, and we're out there for a good 7 hours! Anyways, they wouldn't budge on the time limit rule (even though once inside we shed our gloves, OUTER gloves - yep they gave us 2 pairs, hoods, and Mason was even wearing shorts!) but they did invite us to lick any of the ice sculptures! Hmmm, wouldn't have thought of that one! Thanks! We basically cracked up our entire 25 minutes, and left feeling....warm and disappointed! 😊 The rest of the night was much of a bust since they had strict dress codes everywhere, no worries since the next day we needed to pick up the Tron and get on our way!
We were SO EXCITED to meet our new friend, TripTRONic, DiscoTRON, and GlobalTRON to name a few of the nicknames it got on the first day! Ryan settled into the drivers seat and I gladly took the role of navigator! We had a 100 page atlas that clearly marked out all of the campgrounds, reststops, cheese factories, walking paths, and .... lord of the ring
movie sets? It's true! Our first day we visited an awesome cheese shop and of course had the tasting platter to decide which were to be the lucky cheeses selected to come on our journey! We then hit the coromandel peninsula and did an amazing hike to the catherdral coves! It was an easy hiking trail with very cool rewards, we were able to see two different hidden beaches that were surrounded by spectacular white limestone cliffs and had no people anywhere! We then drove our way to our first campground...excuse me....Holiday Park. Here we parked in between two other campers, that we later noticed had permanent verandas and gardens growing around them! After coming back from the bathroom, Ryan declared that we had the nicest camper in the park, and noted that I was one of the few that actually had wheels! the campground manager couldn't believe how far we had driven...all 200 miles....and was amazed that we were hitting the road again so early (9am) and we were going to go soooo far again! (another 200 miles.) Wow!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.254s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 22; qc: 74; dbt: 0.1259s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Aunt Sassy
non-member comment
still fun
hey girl, glad to see you're still having a blast! I don't know how you do it - I'd be wiped out after what you've done already and you're still going for a couple more months! you nut! but keep the blogs coming please!