We woke up in the morning to lots of bugs. The mosquitoes had feasted on poor chase in the middle of the night, and his legs were completely covered with bites. I think he counted over 40 bytes on just his legs alone. Of course, that’s over the amount of time that we’ve been here in New Zealand so far, but many of them were just that night I think.
We drove away from the Waipu Caves camp site and headed toward Auckland where Chase hoped to get a shower at a gym or something like that. Unfortunately, all we found an Auckland was traffic and the concrete jungle that both of us have grown to hate. So after spending about 4 minutes in Auckland, we quickly made the decision to get right back on the freeway and head south.
Boy do I hate cities. It might be New Zealand, but it’s still a concrete jungle to me.
So we headed south once again, this time toward Hamilton. Grateful, in Hamilton, Chase found a gym that he could take a shower at, and the person at the gym even let him take a shower for free since that’s all he was wanting. That was pretty cool because normally they would charge at least the one day fee for going to the gym, but since all he was wanting was a shower, they just let him go ahead and go right in to do just that.
After that, we got some gas and did some grocery shopping and stopped off at the auto parts store to buy some brakes. The brakes had been squealing quite a bit for quite a while since we got the car and so we grab some brake pads and slap them on in the parking lot, Chase doing most of the work.
We tried to see if there was something we could do with the broken bumper and headlight, but unfortunately it’s damaged beyond what we can do with a quick fix. Gratefully, it’s not damaged beyond the point of youth. We don’t really notice much of a difference functionally: We just know that it’s broken.
Honestly, there weren’t really many adventures, or even any adventures to report for the day. After getting all our shopping done in Hamilton, with Chase getting his shower, with some gusto, we left Hamilton for the same reasons as we left Auckland. Though Hamilton wasn’t anywhere near as big as Auckland, it was still a lot bigger than what either of us wanted to be in at the moment, so we headed down to Rotorua because we heard the people recommend that we go there. There. What time we got there, the sun was starting to go down, so we found a little parking spot by the lake, spend a little more time watching Lord of the Rings, and crashed for the night. Night. Gratefully, the wind was strong enough that the bugs were a non-issue. 🥳🥳🥳
Love to all. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 