Sunday we headed towards Rotarua taking the bomb very carefully on the winding wet roads. You can tell the Romans never invaded NZ, not a single straight road in sight. Our first coffee stop in the middle of nowhere was an English teashop/shrine to the English royal family. The landlady was dressed as if playing a role in Downton Abbby and had every kind of royal memorabilia on display including Charles and Diana mugs http://www.corogate.com . At the back of th...

After an early start in Brisbane we dropped off the car that had been a second home for almost four weeks and exactly four thousand kilometres. A three hour flight later we were in Auckland going through the most stringent customs we've ever encountered on any of our travels. My blood drained when the dog came and stopped at Aimee only for us to work out that she had a cereal bar in her backpack. Thankfully our hosts Kay and Derek came to meet us as we may not ...

We can't believe that our time in Oz is at an end. Our drive back from Agnes Water took us back to Bree's (off road for a bit) in time for us to celebrate the New Year with the Alder cousins. All three children stayed up to welcome 2014, they were the main entertainment dancing and dressing up. January 1st we had a final family gathering at Robbie and Christine, Ken & Celia drove down from Buderim and Robbie and Wendy Johnston came up from Moreton Bay with ...

27th Dec Today we left the sunshine coast, found the Bruce highway and headed towards our home for the next four days on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. Our tom tom thought it would be a laugh and took us off road; thank goodness we're in a 4x4. After about 40kms of only us travelling on gravel road making the yellow car game redundant only seeing a couple of sugar cane farms we returned to a tarmac road, still off the beaten track. The farms had no...

The 23rd brought another long drive we said goodbye to New South Wales and entered our final province Queensland of our Australia trip. For whatever reason, probably the weather this is where our biggest concentration of family members are. We broke our trip stopping at Alan and Shelly in Mermaid Bay on the gold coast. Our half hour stop turned into lunch catching up with Pat and Derek who were over here from South Africa while the cuzzies spent the entire time...