As we had a late ish night which we just haven't been having on our own, we got up late. We were all late in getting going and didn't set off anywhere until around 11.00am. We were going to make our way north together to Taupo. Along the way though we wanted to stop at Mount Tongariro aka Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings. We got to the car park and went into the i-site to ask about conditions on the walking track. She said it had snowed so it might take longer, there are some waterfalls half way and on a good day you can see Mount Doom in the background of the falls, although today is quite cloudy. We set off for the walk, the board read two hours return. The walk was ok we did get some snow on the way to the waterfalls but not too much. The waterfalls were beautiful and it looked as though on a summers day you could go for a dip. The snow had started to get thicker here and slushier. By the time we got back, about two and a half hours later we all had completely wet feet. Back to our vans for some lunch and to warm up. While in our vans we heard what sounded like an air raid siren, it was really loud and we weren’t sure what it was for, we were half way up at snowy mountain we were hoping it wasn’t as drastic as an avalanche! Sam went across to the i-site to ask, she came back and said it was just the volunteer fire and rescue getting a call out, that was a relief for us. After lunch we set off for Taupo with a few look out stops along the way. When we reached Taupo it was just about dark but we found a car park on the lake front which seemed campervan friendly and got parked up in there. Sam and Steph have no internet on their phones so any internet they have needed has been using free wifi from Mcdonalds. They needed to get a couple of flights booked so we all spent the evening in there mooching the wifi. They managed to get everything done but it had got pretty late so we set off back to our van to get some sleep.