Our Wicked Walkabout

Nothing better than to spend your last day in the City of Sails than on a harbour cruise! We spent the morning getting ourselves sorted for our last airplane ride. It’s a real game of Tetris to pack all our gear, and keep the bags under the 23 kg limit! We had a quick lunch…

Seeing the sights. We decided to drive into the CBD, the train ride would have been an hour and half, and we felt that driving in Auckland is similar to Ottawa, a big city, but not too big. So off we headed, our goals for the day, the tower, and see the harbour. We found…

Yesterday we drove from KariKari, back to Auckland. Our last major drive down under. We took a slightly different drive than the one we took on the way north. And the weather was definitely better. We did get some lovely views, but there were not as many places to stop to take pictures… but we…

Seriously, the road we took today was called the Far North Road. We left our little town on the KariKari Peninsula, and swung around the bay to Whatuwhiwhi… remember Wh is Fffff… We then, turned around and made our way to the Tip of the North Island. A two hour drive, with construction, to Cape…

This makes for interesting names of villages, since Whanga also mean Bay… So there are many villages that start with an “unexpected” fff sound.and the G is a hard g…pronounced as Faan-gah, which ends up sounding a bit like Faaaakk We drove to Whangarei… but many times the GPS referred to Whangaruru… this caused many…

Yesterday we relocated to the middle of the North Island, to the area known best for Volcano valley, hot springs, mud baths, sulfur smells and Hobbiton Among other things. The day started clear enough to get one last pic of the mountain The rest of the drive was grey, and rainy… but not enough to…

When looking at a map of the North Island of New Zealand, you can’t help but notice this blip/bump in the west side. When you look closer at the maps, you see there is a lone mountain there… and you are intrigued… Well we were. So we left Wellington for the Taranaki region. As with…

The Cathedral The Parlement. Old st Paul’s The cable car