We woke up to it being so quiet this morning apart from the birds we could hear outside. We are going to stay for a while because we need to get ourselves organised, it’s now less than a week before we fly to America and we’re not ready for it. We had breakfast and sat at the table organising. We now know what we’re going to do with our last week here and how much we think we can get done. We have also started looking at car rentals to get us from San Franc...

Rotorua is in a thermal activity zone, there’s tonnes of it here, that’s why the whole place smells permanently of bad eggs (sulphur). We didn’t get up too early as I’d slept crap due to my cold, it’s definitely got worse. We set off around 10.00am to Kuiria Park where you can walk around thermal activity for free. We found it, parked up and took a walk, we definitely knew we’d found it due to all of the steam coming off the park, even the drains stea...

We got up this morning and got the van ready to go. We said our goodbyes again to Sam and Steph who are now going to make their way to Auckland to fly early Thursday morning to Christchurch, picking up another camper and exploring the south island. It was strange saying goodbye again, we have promised to meet up in the UK at some point though. So we got in our van and set off for Mata Mata, the home of Hobbiton. It didn’t take too long to get there. We did have...

It’s my birthday today! It feels so strange to be my birthday, when we first planned our trip our date we were due home was 12th June. We then wouldn’t have been away for it but here we are in a campervan in the middle of New Zealand. We got a few bits done this morning that needed doing as we were at a proper campsite then Sam and Steph came across to ours with a sack full of balloons, they’d written on one like a card and brought presents. A bottle of win...

We woke up this morning and Sam and Steph had moved in the night because it was that windy in the night. They came back though after they had checked about Sam’s skydive. The weather was ok apart from the wind. At the moment it’s too windy but she’s booked in again at 10.00am so she has to go back and check again just before that. We all then got breakfast until it was time for her to go, she came back again, the wind is still too strong. She booked onto th...