We got up about 7:00 to pack up. We transported to a sister motel and stored our backpacks. We could catch a bus from there to town. We had to go pick up our airline tickets to Nelson. It was a pretty good distance into town. I should say city. Auckland has a population of about 1.3 million. Most of New Zealand’s population is on the North Island and most of it in Auckland. There are only 3 million people all together on both islands. It’s always a challenge learning a new city but we’ve done amazingly well… even when they send us on wild goose chases. The place where we were told to go had no knowledge of the tickets. It took asking three people there before any of them would claim anything. Finally, they called to pursue it and found someone who would take responsibility. That meant a bus transfer for us to another part of town. We found it and got the tickets but then had no time to really look around the city. We realized our flight was a couple hours earlier than we had thought so we headed back on the other bus to get our bags and head to the airport.

We traveled on a two-prop plane to Nelson on the south island. We were picking up our Kiwi Experience Bus there the next day. It was a beautiful sunny day and a scenic flight. We shared a taxi with a German fella to the hostel where I had reservations. Nelson is not a big city and didn’t have an airport shuttle. We got there about 3:00. There was Internet access on the office computer so they let me play with that awhile. They wouldn’t be open too late. We headed out to explore town and walked to the end of town to hike up a mountain to a scenic overlook. It is billed as the center of New Zealand and there is a marker up there. If you look at the map and use the four farthest reaching points N, S, E, W it really does hit the center. It was a steep climb but well worth it. We could see the whole town and out to the sea. After hiking down we found a neat little café and sat outside to eat. It was my favorite meal and conversation of the whole trip. We just sat for hours and talked and it was great food. We just had nachos and pesto melts and salads and a great piece of chocolate cake to split. Andrew and I are really enjoying ourselves. He thinks its kinda cool that we’re traveling. I think the only time he’s a little self-conscious is when we walk through the guys in the hostel…. Like maybe they think he can’t do this on his own or something.

We set out to walk to the beach and took an alternative route. We ended up way up in the hills of the neighborhood and couldn’t find any connection to go down on that other side. We wound all around. Found a pet goat up there tied to a tree near the street. We gave up on going all the way to the beach. We’d have been walking home the whole way in the dark. It was a long way. My dogs were tired too! We found a way down to a pier and sat there for awhile and watched a guy attempting to windsail. It was comical but we couldn’t laugh because he’d have heard us. He almost sailed right into the pier under us! He stopped and talked to us at that point.