Farewell, North Island!!!

That's similar to the face we will make from the back of the ferry if we see any United Airlines airplanes, since we hold them partly responsible for us missing Auckland completely.

For accurate reporting purposes, that is in fact a Maori warrior greeting our group(Yes, that is in fact a face made for the purposes of greeting another tribe) that was visiting their village. I tried to post it the other night, but had issues so I gave up. Interesting factoid you didn't know about traditional Maori meals made in earth ovens: they make a pretty good pasta salad.

So, tomorrow we get up very early so that we can catch a ferry boat over to the south island of New Zealand. And with that, other then a brief passing through on the way back home, we part ways with the North Island and head south towards colder climates. Yeah, it's weird to think of that, south = cold. The ferry ride should provide us with time to catch up on lost sleep from getting up at 5ish in the morning, since it's 3 1/2 hours long, give or take. It might be overkill, but we're giving our selves something like 30-45 minutes to travel the <5 km to the ferry, because missing it would be bad in ways approaching missing our connecting flights.

Once safely across the tiny bit of Pacific ocean that separates N and S, we'll pick up our new rental vehicle, and head to Nelson. We'll have to figure out what to do there. It's a "at leisure" day, which means no scheduled activities. We had planned out some stuff, but due to my laptop at home crashing at an inconvienent time, we are not sure what. With any luck my dad will have rebooted it for me before then and I will be able to dig up the ideas then.

I uploaded some more pictures to the Picasa album tonight too. The link can be found in my 2nd post I think. It's the word "here" that is green.

The Cleric