362 KM from Auckland to New Plymouth in "Black Betty"

On Friday we spent the morning hiking around Auckland. We found a really pretty park that overlooked the city. After checking out of our luxury we met with Henrik and Sabrina "the German couple". They bought Black Betty for their travels and fixed her up really nice. She has 3 seats up front and a double bed in the back. We picked her up for only $3,250 NZD! We decided it was time to get out of the busy city of Auckland, so we headed South. As we began our adventure out of New Zealand's biggest city we realized that it was rush hour. It's tricky business navigating and driving out of a packed city on the left side of the road with a manual drive car. We managed to make it to one of the southern suburbs and found a Holiday RV park just as the sun was setting. We camped our first night in Black Betty.

Saturday we started our 362km trek in our new (to us) Mitsubishi L300 van to New Plymouth. For those of you who are not familiar with the metric system, 362 Kilometers is about 225 miles. We are staying with the Zwart family here for the next 4-5 weeks. The drive down the coast was amazingly beautiful. There were rolling hills with cows and sheep, lots of farms, steep mountains with many different types of trees (palm trees included), and little communities along the way. We got a great view of Mount Egmont (also referred to as Mount Taranaki) just outside of New Plymouth and it is still an active volcano.

Five reasons we know we are in a foreign country:

1. Everything is in the metric system.

2. We are driving on the left side of the road.

3. When we were paying for a coke at a gas station John asked me for a "dime" meaning a 10 cent piece and the lady behind the counter looked very confused.

4. We decided to figure out our gas mileage, it came to 9 kilometers/Liter. Hum.......is that good?

5. It's winter, we are wearing winter clothes, but everything is green and people are mowing their lawns.