After a 7 hour delay at Wellington Airport, we eventually made it to Auckland, our final destination in NZ, to visit family.As we were so late we missed our dinner at Graham's cousin's house, and only just made it to Auckland airport before Graham's Auntie Christine did, and she was arriving home from England! The next day we borrowed Graham's Auntie's car and went exploring some of the areas we had not seen on our previous visit to Auckland.It was a beautiful s...

We had chosen to stay in Feilding, as it was convenient, the campsite was cheap and the town had been voted 'New Zealand's most beautiful town' 14 times, so we felt we should go and see for ourselves.Maybe it looks better in the summer, but we couldn't really understand how it had won this award so many times!We drove through Timona Park, which runs by the river, but the weather was bad, so not a good day for a walk.We therefore went to the Art Centre as they had...

We got up early, as we knew the drive today would be challenging, due to the memory of a journey we took a couple of years ago in NZ on the SH38.It was only about 250km to Turangi, but took us 5 hours (much better than the 7 hours it had taken us to get from Napier to Roturua, on the SH38, two years ago).Just because a road is called a Highway in NZ, it does not mean that it will be a 'highway' in the sense of a British highway. We began on the SH3 towards Strat...

We stayed a couple of nights at New Plymouth, and thought it was a really nice small city.We stayed at Belt Road Holiday Park which is about 1.5km south of the city centre and on the cliff edge.We had amazing views of the coast from our van windows, and Graham spent much time watching the boats launching at the port.It was definitely worth the $32 (about 15GBP) a night for this and the family that run it were very friendly.Saying that, I think that most people we...

The ferry journey was pretty good, as the skies were clear and the sun was shining.Once we got out to sea though the waves started to pick up, and a few people started to get sea sickness - I'm pleased that neither Graham nor I suffer from this!We saw more seals on the way, then as we headed towards Wellington it became cloudy - we feared that we had left the good weather behind on the south island, but the clouds did not last for long. We drove a short way up t...