Day 338 – 342: The Final Days in NZ

After Tongariro, we spent the morning in Taupo sorting a few things out for the next leg of our epic journey (cars, accommodation etc) and then drove up to Cambridge to see Ian, Tracy and the kids again (Gemma’s Cousin). We spent another lovely evening with them – again exhausting playing with the kids – and left the next afternoon to go to Raglan for our last few days. Annoyingly, on our drive up from Taupo, we got a major chip in our windscreen, which needed fixing so we spent a couple of hours waiting for that to be done – they just fill it with some magic glue and you can hardly see it anymore!

Now, Raglan is the main destination in NZ for surfing but we had had enough of doing stuff so spent the last few days just getting ourselves ready for the next bit. We went to the beach on Thursday but yesterday, we didn’t even leave the campsite – how lazy is that? To be fair, we did have to sort our van out and pack our bags properly. Thankfully everything still fits in… just.

This morning, we drove into Auckland to drop off our van and then kill a few hours in town, only to discover that they have moved the office – seems we have had the van for so long they forgot to tell us! Anyway, we have found out where the new depot is but it is not in town so we will have to get to the airport earlier than needed.

Tonight we fly to the Raratonga, the Cook Islands, then in a few days we go off to one of the more beautiful, quieter islands (Aitutaki – where they filmed survivor apparently), which should be very nice indeed but by virtue of the international date line we will arrive 19hrs before we leave, which is very odd.