This past week, we were one step closer in our efforts to get the entire Barrantes family to either move to or visit New Zealand. Elena arrived last Sunday to spend a year living and working around New Zealand. If you're under 30, you can (very) easily get a Working Holiday visa which allows to come to NZ for a year without having a job in advance and be immediately eligible to work. Working at a vineyard is high on her list. Oh to be under 30... :)
For her year of traveling around NZ, she wanted to buy a car, and miraculously, a friend of Vanessa's was selling a car in Auckland, available mid-November. Bingo. Todd and I decided to make a trip of it (especially since Elena has limited experience driving a stick shift which her new car was), flew up to Auckland to meet Elena and road tripped back to Dunedin. Here's Elena about 3 hours after she landed in New Zealand with the car's registration in her name - done at a post office for $9.41. Awesome.
From Auckland, we headed over to the east coast of the North Island via Tauranga (a place we know because we've seen it on weather cameras on the news) to Whakatane. A stop at the
World Famous in New Zealand L&P cafe was a must. We love L&P! Elena described it perfectly as liquefied carbonated lemon drops. Yum! We took the requisite pictures with the giant bottle of L&P.
I had desperately wanted to visit Whakatane and take a picture with a sign, because I love saying Whakatane. Despite how it appears, in Maori, the WH is pronounced F, so the pronunciation of this fabulous town is...FAH-KAH-TAHN-NEE!!
From there, we continued along the coast to Opotiki and then headed inland through a crazy curvy gorge to Gisborne which sits on the southeast coast. Somewhere on this journey, we found a giant kiwi fruit. More requisite pictures followed.
We spent the night in Gisborne and headed to Wellington the next morning via Napier. More curvy roads and beautiful scenery followed.
In Wellington, we found Todd's building!
The Beehive - where the Prime Minister's office is...weird, eh?
After a night in Wellington, we took the Bluebridge ferry across Cook Strait from the North to the South Island. It was a lovely crossing (not too rough), and the last hour of the trip is a gorgeous ride through the the Marlborough Sounds.
Elena and her car on the ship...
A couple hours later, we were on the east coast of the South Island in Kaikoura, a lovely beach town known for its whale watching adventures. The drive there was, of course, beautiful.
We had booked ourselves on the 3:30pm ride months ago, but due to high seas (3 meter waves), our voyage was canceled. We put ourselves on the wait list for the 7:15am ride and spent the afternoon the beach - playing with rocks, taking jumping pictures, and soaking in the sun. Later, we visited the local seal colony.
At 7:15am the following morning, the ride was labeled as "Strong Sea Sickness Warning." Since we had to drive 7 hours south after the ride and it wasn't our last day in New Zealand, we decided to pass on the whale watching for now and head on home to Dunedin. In this picture, taken in Kaikoura, I'm pointing to where we are, and Elena is pointing to Dunedin, where we're going.
South of Christchurch where the Canterbury plains provide lots of straight, flat road that go on forever, Todd let Elena drive her own car for a couple of hours. No stalling and not too many bumps for the first try. For her recap of our trip, buying her first car, driving stick on the left, and more, check out her blog at
Curly Girl Abroad - http://curlygirlabroad.blogspot.com/.
We arrived safely home in Dunedin where Vanessa kindly opened up her home to one more Barrantes. Thursday brought the premiere of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (AMAZING!), and Elena (I think) is settling in to Dunedin quite well. Even though I'm sure she'll be making several appearances here, stay tuned to her
blog to see how it's going!
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