Back in Auckland!

Hello all! Firstly, thank you to everyone who has emailed me and left messages on my Message Board, I really appreciate it (especially all you guys at UWIC, Im thinking of you all working hard in the back office whilst I sun it up in New Zealand! By the way Don, Ive been in touch with Tanya and am going to stay with her for a night in a few weeks time!).

Well what have we been up to over the past few days, what haven't we been up to! We left the Bay of Islands and headed north to Cape Reinga, the northern most part of New Zealand and watched the sun set, really beautiful, and then camped next to the beach and spent the night with 10, 000 mozzies, not nice! Left early to go drive down south again and we were told by the locals that you (and I quote) 'Could not see the Northlands without driving down 90 Mile Beach' which is virtually the local highway, everyone does it, or so we were told! Anyway, so we decided just to drive the last 10 miles or so of the beach in the camper, despite the fact that there are only 4 roads in the whole of New Zealand that we are not insured to drive on, 90 Mile Beach being one of them! Anyway, we go less than half a mile down the beach before getting stuck in some soft sand. No big deal we thought, we'll be out of here in no time! Ok, not 4 and a half hours later we left the beach!! Serious now, we go so stuck, in fact the other 4 vehicles that helped us get out said that they'd seen anyone get that stuck before! A lovely group of guys from Hamilton stopped to help us in their car and after several attempts to pull us out including snapping our vans electricity cable (yes we did actually think that it might have worked!!), it was not happening! So we found a local guy, Paul, and he came to rescue us in his 4 x 4 and then we got totally stuck as well (something he said that had never happened before!). A tourist bus then came past and actually slowed down to allow the tourists to have photo's and record the 'stupid people who thought they could drive 90 Mile Beach in a campervan!' but he then u-turned and came to help us, along with the 40 people who were on the bus! Anyway, to cut a very long story short we finally got out. We had a car, 4 x 4, bus and a Tow truck to help us get out, and fortuanlly the whole saga only cost us our time plus $40, we were so fortunate. So please, never trust any of the locals here and never, ever drive down 90 Mile Beach. You really have to see the pictures to believe it!

From 90 Mile Beach we headed south again and stopped at the oldest and largest Kauri trees in New Zealand, something really worth seeing, they were massive! We went to see Snow Patrol last night which were great but the concert was not in Auckland, whatever the tickets or wet-site said, it took us ages to get there but it was worth it in the end. So we're back in Auckland now and are heading down to Raglan today to sun-up a bit and do some surfing. Wish you were coming with me Gaz, missing you over here.

Hope all is well and thanks again for those who have been in touch.

All my love, Sara xxxx