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 wine and some microwave popcorn, which is a treat when we’re plugged in because we can use the microwave. They wrapped them up in a map of north island. James had got me a few bits along the way, mainly edible that way we don’t have to carry anything more. Once we’d all got going we set off for the Waitomo glow worm caves. Because we had rented our campers through Mighty the driver got to go to the caves for free! We had to wait until their next tour at 2.30pm. We were taken in a group down to the caves which have been formed over millions of years. They have a lake running through them, this is how they have all of the glow worms. We walked further down into it, the caves were pretty impressive on their own then she got us to kneel down and look underneath and you could make out little blue/green lights on the roof, glow worms. She then told us how they catch their food, by making a long sticky string that hangs from them in the hope that mosquitoes etc will fly into it, they have 20 or so of these at one time. She then showed us in the light all those sticky strings hanging from them, wierd! We walked back through the caves and down to a boat at the bottom. We all got into the boat and we could see straight away thousands of glow worms above our heads. The boat ride was about ten minutes in total but really cool. The tour was then over but on coming out there were some walkway routes so we went for a look out route which was ok but for some reason it did send us walking towards a group of huge turkeys. We drove back into town and pulled up in a car park and talked about what to do for tea. I thought it would be nice to go out for something to eat since we’ve all been eating in our vans most of the time. We decided on a place called Hu Hu, as it’s winter everywhere seems to close quite early so we went for it there and then. We had starters, the girls both got pate and James and I had pumpkin and chilli soup. It was gorgeous and enormous, I didn’t need a main after that but we’d already ordered. I got braised beef cheek with chips, it was absolutely amazing but we were all so stuffed. James and the girls got lamb shank. We stayed in there for quite a while keeping warm, after we’d paid we went back to our vans and decided to just stay in the car park for the night. The girls came across to ours with party hats! After a couple of hours we had some more birthday cake. We had a really good night, the only thing is that we all seem to be coming down with a cold.