We arrived in Raglan, on the west coast of the North Island, and fell in love with the place right away. Maybe it was because this sleepy little surf town reminded us of Ocean Beach in San Diego or maybe it was just because we finally put the rainy weather behind us for a bit and got some serious sunshine.

Raglan is famous in New Zealand for its surfing. It has got some of the best left hand point breaks in the country and when the surf is up they line up to form one of the longest breaks in the world.

If you have been following along with us you know that we did do a bit of surfing in Costa Rica and were hoping to do more. We decided that it might be a good time to take a lesson to speed along our progress. We hooked up with an instructor that our campground host knew named Miles - a world class surfer who has travelled the world in competitions and (more importantly) took Metallica out surfing when they came to NZ (Sweet!). After a few hours with miles our confidence was way up and we were both catching decent waves consistently and standing up. What an amazing feeling! I could feel myself getting the addiction. The next few days we rented boards and hit the waves staying at the beach for hours. I talked to surfers who said that they had surfed all the great surf spots on the Norht Island and now that they had found Raglan they had no need to go anywhere else.

Now the South Island is another story . . . but, like I said, that's another story and we haven't got there yet!