We flew into New Zealand on March 17th and hurriedly proceeded to the Telecom counter to pick up a mobile WiFi device. The kids needed Internet for their school and Willie for his work. We knew without a portable WiFi device this might get tricky. What we didn’t know was that 80% of New Zealand doesn’t have cell phone service and the mobile WiFi would be useless. While Willie dealt with setting up our plan, I used the courtesy phone to call the hotel for their free shuttle service. With the exception of our issues with Air New Zealand in Tahiti, things had actually been running quite smoothly. That was until we showed up at the hotel and were informed that they had no record of our hotel reservation. After a ridiculous conversation with the receptionist, we concluded that Expedia had not made the necessary changes to our itinerary and although I had a confirmation number for this hotel on this day, they did not have our reservation. I finally did get it worked out with the reservation counter the next day, but it was not a good way to end a 12 hour day of travel.
After getting a few hours of sleep, we woke to an all you can eat breakfast buffet and endless cup of coffee that made up for the previous long day of travel. We stuffed ourselves with waffles topped with raspberry preserves, scrambled eggs, sausage, fruit, and croissants. The carbo-loading and caffeine helped fuel us for the long day ahead.
We were all exhausted but excited to start our new adventures on the 6th Island of our South Pacific tour. We sat at the RV rental desk, filled out the necessary waivers, and rental agreements, got a 10 minute tour of the how-to’s of our camper van and we were off – driving a huge ass campervan on the left hand side of the road, with manual shift on the left side of the steering wheel that was on the right hand side of the vehicle. Already being somewhat spatially challenged in addition to the lack of sleep, I willingly handed the keys over to Willie.
We hadn’t done a whole lot of research on New Zealand. We knew of a few key places on the North Island that were iconic surf destinations, but that was about it. We had a few maps and a tourism radio that came with the vehicle. It is a GPS tool that plays music through your radio but alerts you to all the tourist attractions. I must say, it came in quite handy for ill prepared tourists like our selves.
We first headed North to the Pak and Save for provisions and continued North of Auckland on Hwy 1to a town called Orewa, where we stopped in the local surf shop for some beta and a wet suit for Willie. It was time to suit up for some colder water. With that checked off our to do list, we decided to continue on to our final destination of Ahipara to a surf break called Shipwrecks. All went well until we missed the turn for HWY 1 and ended up about 1 and half hours out of our way in the native bush. Twelve hours later, we had reached our destination, pulled over on the side of the road and called it home for the night.
Shipwrecks surf break is off to the right. They say when it is “going off” you can ride this left for 1 kilometer. Unfortunately we missed it by a day.
For the next 2 weeks we drove around the countryside and coastline of the North Island…….