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.

We made it!

We left DIA at 5:47pm (MST) on Aug. 31, 2009. After two tasty airplane meals, free drinks, a few hours of choppy sleep, crossing the Equator, over 200 pages of vampire reading, 2 movies, crossing the International Date Line, watching the moon turn into an almost full moon, a few more hours of choppy sleep, and almost 16 hours of total air time we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand at 4:55am (New Zealand Standard Time) on Wednesday September 3, 2009. New Zealand is 18 hours ahead of MST. So the easiest way to figure out what time it is for us (if you live in MST) is to add a day then subtract 6 hours. For example, if it's 4pm (MST) on Tuesday, you add a day, so it's 4pm on Wednesday then subtract 6 hours. So it would be 10am NST on Wednesday. :)

We took a shuttle, the scenic way, from the airport to our hotel. Luckily they had a room available at 8am. THANKS DAD!!! Since we arrived so early in the morning we decided to stick it out and stay up all day so we can start adjusting to the time difference. Sitting down sounds like a recipe for sleepiness, so we tried to stay very busy in our zombie form. We had a very tasty lunch at an authentic New Zealand Wendy's, set up a bank account, found the library, visited The Sky Tower (the tallest tower on the Southern Hemisphere), went swimming on the roof (it was a little chilly), and ate at Mexicali (the best mexican restaurant in Auckland). Then we watched our first sunset

in the Southern Hemisphere.

Things we have learned so far:

1. Bathrooms are called Toilets.

2. Elevators are called Lifts.

3. When ordering coffee with cream you need to specify pouring cream not whipping cream and that it should be a little bit added not half of your drink!

4. Looking both ways before crossing the street is as important as ever.

5. Ordering lunch meat from the deli in grams is very tricky!

6. It is difficult trying to figure out how much fruit costs when it says NZ$ per kg.

Stay tuned for our upcoming adventures....buying a van, driving on the left side of the road, and navigating through New Zealand's biggest city :)