What can I say.  It was fantastic!  Everyone said it was the best they had been at.  In any case, we enjoyed it and had a great time.

Lisa welcoming our guests

Tohu, our Maori minister was wonderful!

Ann was (and is!) most lovely.

We really enjoyed the ceremony

...and of course the cake....

Such a good time with 25 or so of our cruising friends and of course Janette and Alistair at Riddlesden B&B which is where everyone should stay when in Whangarei.  Fantastic place!

So now, we’re down to the final projects.  I finished installing the porthole in the head today and Ann was out “provisioning” with Blue Rodeo Anne and Lisa.  We not only have commodity foods (i.e. pasta, canned goods, etc), but are also stocking up with gifts for the islanders we meet.  Ann found some great New Zealand Rugby hats for a buck apiece. Nice giveaways.  We also have some beach balls for the kids we meet as well as school supplies.  We’re a couple weeks and counting before leaving.

Also, we have been using our (my) new paddle board each morning.  Great exercise to go up-river for an hour or so via paddleboard.  Today we went up under the bridge and back.  Nice!

Blogging by Ann…

After two weeks land cruising we are back on Charisma. What an incredible trip we had. And we only hit about half of the North Island of New Zealand! We drove through gorgeous country, enjoyed fabulous hiking, learned (at least for me) how to mountain bike and even enjoyed kayaking on the biggest lake on the north island. And no words could do it justice! The most amazing part…everyone tells us that this is nothing compared to the South Island! Next year we will hit the South Island and let you know!

Our return was bitter sweet. We were having a fabulous trip and would have loved to extend it but not only was Charisma calling us but we needed to get back to complete our wedding plans! Yep, the big day is this Saturday! We promise to post pictures!

Our to do lists (they are never ending) include wedding tasks and the final boat chores. Yesterday I was able to finish covering the seat cushions in our main cabin and I am very pleased with the result. And Bob is pleased to have it done AND the sewing machine put away. It takes up a lot of room.

Bob was able to repair a leaking prism in the deck today and found a sheared screw that held on the hand rail, which he also repaired. Two leaks repaired! Yeah! Tomorrow sends Bob up the mast to replace the bent windex- thank you boobies, and the VHF antenna. Important jobs.

This morning Bob test drove a stand-up paddle board. And I got to play too! It was a beautiful morning and one cup of coffee was enough to get us going! Did I tell you how much I love paddle boarding? Sorry spin class, this one gets me outside too and if I don’t fall in the water, which neither of us did, it is a lot of fun, good exercise! So now Bob has one too (thank you Marily and Tom for this part of our wedding present) and now we can play together since I have one we bought in Mexico!

Ann testing MY new board!

Again, testing MY board, but also using her new, super fancy paddle...

Home sweet home, exciting days ahead!

Got our land cruising pictures up.  Go back in the archives to March 22 and forward from there (or start here and scroll down to the 22nd) to see pictures of our trip from Whangarei down to Wellington at the tip of the North Island and back again.  Great trip.

We’re back in Whangarei and on Charisma. Yay! But…we really enjoyed our two weeks of land cruising and look forward to seeing much more of New Zealand next season when we’re back (Novemberish).

We drove from Hamilton (yo, JHam) four hours back to Whangarei. Made it past Auckland this time on a Saturday, so no significant traffic.

Coolest part of the day-stopping at SheepWorld! OK, sounds a bit “iffy”, but turned out fascinating. With full irony we started our visit with a Lamb Burger. I have to say it was delicious and much less fatty than a hamburger. They just need to find a better name since you do think of a little cuddly lamb when ordering…

After lunch, we went to the “show”. I was prepared for an overpriced, under delivered experience, but it was more fun…The farmer who owned the place turns out to be a natural showman and did a fabulous job showing us all how he manages his sheep. It started out with an awesome demonstration of his dogs herding the sheep. A Border Collie and a local NZ dog called a “Huntaway”. Incredible how they can herd the sheep and how they take commands. The show went on with demonstrations of shearing sheep that actually made the whole process fascinating. There is actually a choreography that the shearer goes through as he/she maneuvers the sheep with his legs and arms through the whole range of shearing from one side to the other. The farmer then demonstrated how to put a sheep to sleep by just using “pressure points”around the sheep’s ears. It literally fell asleep on the stage!

Amazing!

Well, that’s what we all do for entertainment here in New Zealand!

SheepWorld!! (OK, some of us are more excited than others)

Sam the New Zealand Huntaway (that's the type of dog-specially bred in New Zealand to herd sheep)

Boyd the Border Collie in action. Amazing dogs!

A live demo on sheep shearing. It was too dark for the action shots, but here's how they hold the sheep so they don't squirm. Amazing the choreography involved in shearing.

OK, so that was the dumb name we came up with for all the wine we bought. I mean, we rode bikes through the vineyards of Napier (Hawke’s Bay region) and the van following us to carry all the wine we bought had to know whose wine to ask for!

Logo for the city of Napier in the heart of north island wine country

The reunion. John and Lisa have been five weeks land cruising the south island and we managed to meet up here in Napier for a great weekend of wine tasting

We spent a great day with “On Yer Bike” riding hither and yon through beautiful vineyards. Add to that it was my birthday AND we were able to meet up with Lisa and John from Orcinius who were headed back from five weeks on the south island, and it was about the perfect day. Well, it became perfect after the amazing dinner they treated us to at “The Old Catholic Church”. As it sounds, it was a church built in the 1800’s but transferred to private hands when the parish outgrew it and built a newer, larger one closer to town. Amazing venue and food. I even got to confess my sins to “St John” in the confessional. Might have worked, but probably would have taken a couple days. Ann made up for the blasphemy with some Hail Mary’s and we headed home marveling at the great time we had.

It was a beautiful day for riding and tasting...

...tooling through the vineyards without a care...

...blue skies...

...gorgeous scenery...

...and our trusty bikes to convey us around the country.

A little tasting...

...a nice picnic...

...a little wine...(OK, quite a lot-but we weren't technically driving!)

It all added up to a great birthday! Thanks Ann, John and Lisa for a wonderful day!

Te Papa Tongarewa literally means; “container of treasures” and that’s what we found.

Te Papa is a museum on Wellington’s waterfront and as described in the tour book it’s; “an innovative and interactive national museum”. Like discovering a beautiful Easter Egg on Easter Sunday! We found it to be all that and more, containing really interesting exhibits on Maori culture, history and art heritage. Add to that the fact that it traces the Maori migration across the South Pacific and we were hooked.

The waterfront just outside the museum

"Now, where was that Hobbit exhibit?"

So much cool stuff and not enough pixels to show it to you.

Having sailed the opposite direction as the Maori’s migrated over the centuries, we found the exhibits to be a fantastic explanation of what we found during our journey. The carvings, arts and weaving as well as the descriptions of the people just added to the discovery of our year past.

Speaking of which, today (April 1st) is one year from the date we left Mexico to sail all this way across the Pacific. We’re still not really feeling like we’ve gone all that far, but as we meet people on this land tour and they ask where we’re from and we summarize our journey, you can just see their eyes getting bigger as they sense the distance we’ve travelled by sailboat. Maybe someday as we get further away, we’ll feel the same.

We also spent time walking about town visiting the old St Paul Cathedral, built entirely of beautiful carved wood. Today, before we left, we walked over to the historic cable car and took it up the mountain overlooking Wellington, which is a very hilly city.

We took the old time trolly up the steep hill to overlook Wellington

We’re now heading north from Wellington, which is the southern most point of the north island and of our land journey for this year. As of this moment we’re in Dannevirke, up near the wine region of Napier where we’ll end up tomorrow (look for NZ wines from Hawk’s Bay which is Napier). Dannevirke is a small town settled by Scandinavians in the late 1800’s for sheep farming. Today you can see little of that heritage beyond the town name and the giant Viking that stands over town hall. In fact given it’s the day after Easter and still a holiday weekend, the only restaurant open was a Chinese takeout place.

Dannevirk was once a scandinavian settlement. Not too much left from that, but this Viking over the tourist bureau

On the way back from breakfast, we came across these surprisingly "happy" sheep. Turns out in talking with the famer, they are all being sent to "stud". Each will mate with at least 100 ewes over the next week!

Tomorrow looks to be a fun day as our good friends John and Lisa have just taken the ferry back across from their trip on the south island and are meeting us in Napier for lunch and maybe some wine tasting! Yay! It will be great to catch up with them. Perfect way to spend Day Two of my Birth Month.

That was the question that Bob asked last night as we started winding down. As it turns out it was more important than it sounds. Our land cruising routine has been that I (Ann) am the captain and the navigator. Bob steers the vehicle to the locations I choose. Perfect, right?

One place we had to stop at was Whakapapa. Why, just because the Kiwis pronounce the "WH" as "FF". Figure it out.

So far this has worked well. I book our next hotel, send the confirmation to Bob’s email and navigate using our maps. I choose our next location based on several travel guides, local brochures that are available everywhere (all provided by the NZ government at no cost to the local establishments to promote tourism), and suggestions gathered from friends and tourism offices.

Our next stop was to be Wanganui, a city close to the southwest coast as way to break up the longer trip to Wellington. But when Bob tried to find the hotel on the Google map he kept getting directed to a city smack in the middle of the southern half of the island! What? Why does Google keep showing our hotel in Taihape?

Mickey, the owner of the Discovery Lodge we were checking out of, came to our rescue. These tourism folks are incredibly knowledgable about their country and so happy to help. Turns out that the motel was most likely listed incorrectly on the booking site but Mickey was not only able to direct us to it but told us she thought it was a better direction to go.

And she was right! We ended up in beautiful rolling farm country lined with groves of aspen trees and defined by sudden gorges. At one point we came to a fork in the road and Bob commented that he felt like we were in a Robert Frost poem. We took the road less travelled and stopped numerous times to try to capture the beautiful scenes. Hopefully when we post some of them you will agree that we found the best route. And less travelled…we came across one tractor moving between fields and two sheep that had escaped and were frantically trying to find their way home.

So here we are in the self-proclaimed gumboot capital of New Zealand, having missed the annual gumboot throwing contest by a mere week! Sometimes the planning just works!

The road less travelled...

...turned out to be an amazing find...

...so glad we "went the wrong way".