Todd and Lisa’s RTW trip

So far we love this country!!! We don’t want to curse it but we have had nothing but great luck.  First we booked a room in a hostel, but when we arrived it was full.  The owner convienently also had a B&B that she put us in for the same price.  Then our plain silver ford station wagon had some issues, so we took it back and got a PURPLE one with tinted windows.  Then, we made tentative plans to head further north to try and do some diving, but an awful storm rolled through and we had to change plans to head east instead.  We spent one extra day in Auckland and got in touch with a friend of Ivan and Floria’s, Clovis.  We couldn’t even believe it when we told him we wanted to head to a place called Hot Water Beach and he told us he had a camper (they call it a caravan) there that we could use.  We spent the afternoon with him, wife and baby and got all the advise we needed.

We drove to HWB and got to his camper.  It was awesome.  The camper is right out of 1970, complete with orange formica and all.  What was really spectacular was the location.  It was up on a hill overlooking the ocean… AWESOME.  We couldn’t stop cracking “white trash, red neck” jokes.  “Woman get in the kitchen and make me a drink” kinda stuff.  It was a hoot.

The thing that was so cool about HWB was that if you go down at low tide, you can did a hole in the sand and HOT water comes up.  You can sit in your hot water pool, while the cold ocean waves splash up on you.  Really fun.  We left today and headed through a town Te Aroha.  We stopped and had a spa bath at the world’s only hot soda water springs.  Too much excitement for one day… here are some pic’s.

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