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".