We woke up that morning to a construction truck parked in front of Sophie and a whole crap ton of construction cones lining the roads to the point where we had bed down for the night. 😬
Gratefully, there was a way for us to still get out of where we had stopped for the night, and the construction guy gave us a smile and a nod when he saw us wake up and realize where we were and what was going on around us 😅.
We quickly got our stuff together and got our butts on the road, heading into Auckland. We had a few priorities for the day, given that we’ve been on our trip almost a week. The first thing was to get the car finally put in my name as the owner.
So we headed over to the first place that looks like it was a place to change ownership, and we could have changed ownership there, but I didn’t have an address for us to list as an address for registration and ownership, so she gave me the form to fill out, but that was all I could do. I had to figure out what address I could use.
My brother who used to live in New Zealand was no longer in contact with anyone in New Zealand, so I couldn’t use anyone that he knew. The lady at the first place gave us the location of another place we could go to try and get it figured out, so we went to the other place where they actually do the safety inspections and whatnot. I talked to the lady behind the counter, and she said there wasn’t really anything that she could do, but she gave us the phone number for the government agency that was in charge of that stuff, or something like that.
So I called the number she gave me, and I talked to a lady who gave me an address that she said the people doing the owner change might accept. I think it was basically the address of one of the DMV stations. So I wrote that down, but then, fortunately, the guy we bought the car from said he was willing to let us use his address for the change of ownership.
By the time I had gotten that far, we had already left Auckland and were heading southeast to go to a fairly famous gorge that was in one of the books about New Zealand we’d heard about. I can’t remember the name of the gorge right now, so give me a moment, and I’ll look it up. Karangahake. That’s it. Chase just looked it up.
It was raining pretty hard when we got to the gorge, but since my mom had decked me out with rain gear before I left, and since we bought a rain jacket for Chase, we were set to go.
The gorge wasn’t really anything to write home about. Though, I guess I am sort of writing home about it right now. 🙃 It was definitely pretty, the river crashing below the bridges we were walking on. Old mine leftovers to see.
After we left the gorge, we debated whether or not to go to Hobbiton. We’d read that the tickets we wanted were sold out for several days, and that we had to order the tickets online. We had a thought, though, that maybe we just show up and there could be a standby line or something like that. So we decided to make the drive all the way to hobarton, on the off chance that we might be able to make it on one of the little tours.
The road into Hobbiton was beautiful with sort of a prairie type feel like you would feel in the United States except for it was bright, bright green. Lots and lots and lots of bright green rolling hills everywhere. And sheep, of course. It is New Zealand after all. 🙃
I took a little video of the landscape as we were entering the area where Hobbiton was built.
We weren’t able to drive up directly to Hobbiton itself. They built sort of a welcome center. Probably a mile or so away. That’s where they have their gift shop and bathrooms and little restaurant and all the buses and ticketing stuff. It’s pretty amazing how many people still go to visit Hobbiton. The first movie came out 21 years ago, but it is definitely still going strong!
And hey, guess what! The stuff that we read online was wrong! We didn’t need to buy our tickets ahead of time. In fact, we showed up, and managed to get right on the very next tour. No standby line. No issues whatsoever at all, other than that it was raining a good bit of the time during the tour, but we were prepared with our rain jackets and everything, so it wasn’t anything at all to deal with.
It was also nice that we were. I think the second to last tour of the day, so it had slowed down a decent bit, and Chase and I hung back and were the last ones to leave each of the little stations of the tour, which meant we got decent pictures without a crap ton of people everywhere.
Aside from the movie set that I was on because I was an extra for a movie 15 or so years ago, this is the first movie that I’ve ever been to. I’m not a dress up fanatic fan, so to speak, but I definitely loved the Lord of the rings, Hobbit, and I even have a little place in my heart for the new Hobbit TV show, even though it’s a struggler in some ways. 🙃
Was definitely worth the drive and the price of admission and was a lot of fun to be there.
After going to hobarton we drove up to a town called Tauranga, where we went to Wendy’s because we knew it would have Wi-Fi, grabbed some food and talked a good bit about what we were going to do on the trip and what not.
We stayed for quite a long time, pretty much until they closed. We started trying to get our travel itinerary figured out because neither of us wanted to spend as much time in Australia as we originally had booked, so Chase waited online with Air New Zealand for like 2 hours before they just hung up on him.
Meanwhile, little Stephen got himself addicted to a dating app and spent probably 3 hours perusing the various people on the app nearby. 🙃
Chase says it’s my cocaine.
I’ve definitely been out of the game for so long that I don’t even really remember how to play, but I’m pretty good at striking up conversations with people, at least on this trip I have been, so maybe it’ll all come back here soon. 🙃
One of the ladies at the grocery store yesterday told me that I should find a New Zealand woman here, and an Australian woman we ran into told me that she has two daughters and that we could stay at her house, and that’s how she found her husband. 🙃
As an aside, it’s been a lot of fun striking up conversations with random people. In my next post, I’ll tell you about the woman we met at the grocery store. 🙃
After spending probably 3 hours at Wendy’s and much of that time on the dating app, we needed to find a place to stay for the night. Chase had downloaded an app that lots of people use in New Zealand and Australia called camper mate. With that app, he was able to find a fairly nearby spot for campers that had a bathroom and what not, so we drove out of the town and into the hills in the dark of night and parked Sophie in the parking lot with a couple of other vehicles that were there, bed it down for the night, and crashed until morning.
I’m still way behind in my posting, so I’ll try and get another one posted as soon as I post this one right now.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 