Kids, children, babies, especially ones that get car sick, or maybe have been on an airplane for 89 years recently, do not care about driving the scenic route. Or maybe they don’t care at at all, ever, about hitting the stretch of winding roads and seeing the most magical of views.
When we first made the decision to come to New Zealand for an extended stay, we thought we were going to be that family that did the camper van thing the entire time. We’re campy-type people and we like to be in a small space all together.
But the more that we talked about it, because Barry and I love to talk for 2 million years before we reach any major decisions, we decided that camper van life wasn’t going to be for us. For lots of reasons, really. Kids that get car sick was a MAJOR one.
And since we’ve been here, I’ve thanked my lucky stars more than one time that we aren’t camper vanning our days away. We’ve essentially become glorified beach bums with a ’boutique apartment’ to come home to at the end of a day. It’s awesome and maybe, just maybe, our neighbors don’t love us because we come with small, loud kids.
We’re staying in a small town just across the harbor from Auckland. The ferry is practically spitting distance and I use the word ‘ferry’ very loosely. The boats here they call ferries are tiny boats. (We rented bikes yesterday and rode across and around the city….another post for another day, again).
Anyhow, our first non-jet lagged day here, we got it in our minds (read: I got it in MY mind) that we should do a ‘quick’ trip to the Hot Water Beach just a mere 2.5 hours away. In our tiny compact car.
New Zealand is a very developed country, but their ‘highways’ are very, very rural and their ‘un-sealed’ roads are even more so. We drove for what seemed like hours and stopped at the halfway point, and had lunch, as we hadn’t yet perfected the art of packing massive sandwiches for our outings.
A quick lunch stop and many, many more windy roads we finally got to the Hot Water Beach…..only to learn that the tide was coming up and the actual ‘hot water’ that you can dig do was under the incoming water. Ooops. Forgot to check the tide table.
Our girls didn’t care. They were happy just to run wild on the beach.
Part two tomorrow.
