Auckland

You will notice that my last blog was on April 23 as I was sitting in the Sydney airport waiting for our flight to Auckland, New Zealand. Now I am sitting in the Sydney airport again waiting for our flight to Melbourne, Australia. Why no blog since then? One word – rain. Rain, rain, rain. We arrived on Saturday, the 23rd and had rain every day we were in New Zealand! Except, of course, today when we were leaving. And that caused us to change plans on what we were going to do.
We did get out of the car one day to walk the bush in a small reserve, but as you can tell we had to walk with an umbrella. That doesn’t work real well while walking amongst the trees. (Wow, that sounded so --- English!) Every morning we would get up, turn on the TV to see what the weather was going to be like and plan accordingly. Most of the time we drove to different areas of the upper North Island just to see the area. As we got farther out into the country and away from Auckland Karl and I both exclaimed that it reminded both of us of the highlands of Scotland. Rolling hills, sheep and cattle galore. The only thing missing were the rock fences.
One day we did take a Greyline bus tour of Auckland just to see what was there. During one of the stops we were able to go into the Auckland Museum for an hour and look at Maori items. The Maori’s are the native people that were in New Zealand long before the white settlers ever got there. The country keeps a lot of the Polynesian influence.
Auckland is called the city of sails and it’s a good moniker for it since 1 in 4 people of the 4 million that live there has a boat. Sailboat, motorboat, fishing boat – you name it and it’s there. The landmark that overlooks the city is called, surprise, the Auckland Tower. And like most towers it has a revolving restaurant on the top with observation decks below. It’s a bustling city, but has rather poor mass transit. We finished our tour at 5pm on Thursday and it took over an hour to drive 3 miles to the Harbor Bridge to get out of town. Trains only go just outside the city so if you live farther out, like we did; you either drove or took a bus. And the bus would still take about 90 minutes to cross to the other side of the harbor.
And to give you an update on Karl driving on the left – he is doing very well! But you need to ask him about his love affair with rumble strips. I am getting used to seeing cars coming at me on my right and the fast lane on the freeway is on the far right, but I still have a problem seeing into the back of the car in front of us and not seeing a head on the left – just on the right. That can cause a bit of a start. We were watching a TV show last night and it was filmed in the US show that meant people were driving on the right. It took us a moment to readjust seeing that. And no one should grumble about the price of gasoline. Since we rented a car we had to fill it up with gas a couple of times. The car was a Toyota Corolla. We put in 12 gallons and the total cost? $100 nzd!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is over $6 US currency per gallon!!!!!! So don’t complain when you have to pay ONLY $3.50 a gallon.
Hopefully we will have better weather in Melbourne.