We picked up the camper at 10am, we ended up going for the full insurance as only 20% of people in New Zealand have insurance. The guy gave it to us for next to nothing anyway so we weren't to fussed. We decided to head up north stopping off in Pahia for the night. We headed off from the rental place and it took us about an hour to get out of Auckland, it was a well complicated motorway. We finally got going and realised even though the van was a 3-litre it didn't go very fast and definitely didn't go up hills very well. We decided to nickname the van Willie Miller, which was my idea more than Brid's. We stopped off in Whangerai to stock up on food from the supermarket; we ended up spending a fortune on food. We reached Pahia and I was a lot smaller than I thought it was gonna be, we checked out some of the prices for the Bay of Islands boat tour which was why we came this way. Most places were closed so we decided to do it tomorrow, started looking for somewhere to stay for the night, it was our first night camping in the middle of nowhere and we were being total wimps. We eventually stopped somewhere and cooked spaghetti bolognase for tea. Went to sleep hoping we wouldn't get butchered in the middle of night.

Next morning and the weather was looking so good and the woman said we wouldn't get the full tour so we decided to drive right up to the tip of New Zealand instead. Drove to the bottom of 90 mile beach (which is only 60miles long???). Refilled Willie Miller with Diesel. Willie Miller likes to much the diesel at a shocking rate. Lots of companies drive along the beach in big buses for the tourists, you are advised not to do it in a campervan but we decided to give it a go anyway. We hadn't been driving along the beach for 2 minutes before we were helping an English couple dig and push their campervan out some deep sand. We wimped out and turned back incase we got stuck as the insurance didn't cover it. So we headed up the normal road, stopping near the top to climb some massive sands dunes. There's a small lighthouse at the top and you can spot where the Tasman sea meets the pacific ocean but to be honest we were struggling, we thought we could see it but I think we were just making it up. We headed back down to the bottom of the 90miles beach to a small town, can't remember the name of it. Slept there that night.