Joel and I decided to do a long day trip north to the Bay of Islands.  We booked a 2 hour boat tour and decided to drive up and see what we see along the way.  The drive is about 3 hours each way.  The area north of Auckland is very hilly and very green.  More hills, more green, and lots of cows.  I do believe there may be more cows in New Zealand than people.  The first stop was a honey store / coffee shop.  It was a giant shop on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere.  Next we went to the i site (information center) in the town of Whangarei.  The lady there told us about a waterfall and a harbor area full of restaurants and shops.  We decided to do the waterfall on the way to Bay of Islands and eat dinner in the harbor after.  The waterfall was very pretty and easy to access so it fit nicely into our schedule.  More green hills with cows, a few more stop offs and we were in the town of Paihia where we were to get the boat.  The Bay of Islands is a bay full of islands.  It was the first area of New Zealand to be settled by Europeans.  The big draw besides dolphin watching, beaches, hikes and the history is the Hole in the Rock.  The last island in the area has a big hole in it.  We arrived early and tried to check in.  The lady told us the tour we booked was for tomorrow.  Crap.  She said she’d upgrade us to the 4 hour trip that was leaving now.  It was that or no boat ride so we took it.  Two hours would have been plenty of time.  It was pretty.  We saw some dolphin, some islands and the Hole in the Rock.  We stopped at one island and did a 20 minute hike.  On our drive home we took a more scenic route that went through green hilly areas with cows.  It also went along the coast for a while.  We jumped out at interesting points to take pictures or just look at pretty landscape.  At one point, within a 2 minute span of time, we saw wild turkeys, wild pheasant and wild parrots.  I had never seen wild parrots so that was so neat to see them flying past the car.  We got to Whangarei much later than we wanted.  They had a park we had wanted to walk around, but we skipped that and went straight to the harbor to find dinner.  There were no restaurants at the harbor, just some businesses.  We headed into the downtown area.  There were a ton of restaurants there, but most of them were closed.  The entire town looked like a ghost town at 8:00pm.  We found one that was open so at least we didn’t have to make a decision.  We’ll eat there.  They had lattes by the cup or the bowl.  I had a bowl of latte with my pizza.  We got home around 11:00pm.  Sleep!

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore