Monday, March 18: Overcast to begin with, becoming fine, hot & sunny with some active looking cumulus clouds
Cycling: 17.8 km
Donna’s
Today was a day for planning the rest of the trip and trying to get the rest of the planning to set. After a shower and a breakfast of cornflakes & muesli, toast with the last of the tramping butter, OJ, and coffee, I set to work to try to confirm the reservation in Rotorua, and then to see how to get from there to the Far North.
Flights were still available for around $300 – slightly above that if you wanted only an hour’s wait in Auckland, slightly below if a four hour wait was OK. Considering it was the very last minute (and the Saturday was cheaper than the surrounding days) I wonder what it would have cost if I had tried a week ago – as I should have. In any case a 6:45 departure would have meant getting up @ 5:00, and I still would have needed transport to Paihia from Bay of Islands airport, so at this point in time the bus was the last acceptable solution in terms of price v. duration @ $84 – start is @ 7:45, arrival is 17:15. This is @ the limit of decidability.
BBH still allows me to place booking requests with the old card, and if only I had noted down the security number on the card itself (from where it could not have nicked off to the nirvana it now resides in), I could have had the booking confirmed today. As it was it took a couple of exchanges and in the end a Skype call to hand over my credit card details and the deal was only sealed later in the afternoon. Another twist to the bouncing email saga was that mails sent from my account via Microsoft Mail do not bounce, but those sent via Thunderbird do. Go figure.
Then it was time for the shops. A new notebook (of the paper variety) will be needed in the course of the next few days and I checked out every place that might have one, settling on Warehouse Stationery again, later in the afternoon, for an A5 size for $7. Paper is very white and the lines far apart, but there you go. Numberoneshoes had reasonable jandals for $15 (down from $20), so I got a pair, and was seriously tempted by their “hiking” boots for under $100. The eyelets at least were metal.
Farmers had a set of 130 mL containers for $7.2 which is as near as dammit what is needed. Finally the Warehouse proper yielded one T-shirt with a green NZ motif in M for $17. Another two in size L (red and blue Aotearoa motifs) were tried but found to be too large. Will try again in Rotorua tomorrow.
Time for lunch of two cheese sandwiches (cheese is now also finished), an apple and a Crunchie bar, then it was off to Acacia Bay to try out Donna’s bike. Seemed to go quite well, except for the idiots driving cars – one group in a white car with little of the exhaust pipe left crashed into a red car from behind as they took the hill after the control point bridge. Possibly not only the exhaust pipe was missing, but the brakes as well.
Interactive Map
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A bit of a relief to be off the main road. and even to get onto the cycle track. Have to see whether the holiday park is the one I stayed at in 2010; in any case I took a closer look around and went as far as the Acacia Bay beach, where Taupo Kayaking Adventures, 2/876 Acacia Bay Rd, is located – closed for the day, unfortunately, because it would have been a lovely day for a paddle, and I was in the right gear and was already covered in sunscreen. Took a few pix here, then set off back to town, and along the riverside cycle path to Taupo Bungy, 202 Spa Rd. I would have liked to have ridden the cycle track, but it was quite tricky and in some places just too steep. Got some pix there as well.
Had determined that the one burger place opposite New World was closed on Monday and Tuesday, so that led me to inspect Catch 22, which will do nicely for fish’n’chips this evening.
Slide Show
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Things were beginning to gel on the planning side, except for a shuttle to Cape Brett. Hard to see how else that could be organised.
Donna returned from her work in Turangi (Genesis) and I took off to Catch 22, 181 Spa Rd, for a hoki ($4.3) and half a scoop of chips ($2) which was served in a box so that I could eat it in the outside “beer garden”, and there was a bottle of vinegar hanging around as well. After that I went to the dairy two doors down for a hokey-pokey ($2.5). Back here a bit of packing could be started with. It started clouding over so I thought the sunset wouldn’t be much but after a short review I decided I would try it out.
Dramatic scenes all around from the foreshore as the mountains were in various shades of pink while some rain clouds dropped their load. Tried at least two series and was greeted along the way by one of the women from the bus from Saturday.
