Friday, February 3, 2012

New Plymouth


What better thing to do on a miserably rainy day than update my blog?

And it’s been a few days.  A few cloudy, rainy days.  Most of one of them was spent driving, so that wasn’t too bad, and it’s still a beautiful country in the rain.  Speed limit:



Don’t worry, it’s in kilometers.  It’s also about how many dollars it takes to fill up my tank with gas.  And don't worry, I didn't take the picture... it's difficult to work a camera while driving on the wrong side of the road.  I am getting better every day at backwards driving though.  Every once in a while when I’ve been the only visible car on the road for a ways and then I see one coming at me from the other direction, I get scared for a second because I think they are in my lane, but then I remember I’m on the other side and everything is ok.

I learned a lot about the locksmith business when I took my dreaded key that took ten minutes to get my car to start in to Kiwi Cuts.  It must be a booming business in Northland because I had to go in 4 times before I caught the locksmith when he wasn’t out on a job!  He took my key and decoded it, based on 8 different spacing levels and 4 different depth levels, occasionally using a little magnifier.  He then entered this code into a database, along with my car year, make, and country of origin.  Unfortunately, no matches were found.  But I mentioned I had another key and he lit up, examined it compared to the first one, immediately determined there were slight spacing differences, and found a match with that one!  So he made me two brand new keys that work like a charm.  No more stress over that!

I’m still debating about whether the drive up to Cape Reigna was worth it… it was definitely cool to see the top end of the country, and where the spirits of dead Maori step down the roots of this little tree and into the ocean, and where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet… ok it was worth it.  A family asked me to take a picture of them and of course I obliged, then they asked if I wanted a picture of myself and I tried to say no, but they insisted and we agreed it would make mom happy.   They proceeded to take about 8 pictures, from every angle, with the lighthouse and ocean in the background, etc.  Here’s one:



Close up of the sign so you can tell how really in the middle of nowhere I am:



Camped in Uretiti again on my way back down, and caught this cool picture of the moon (top left corner) and clouds around sunset:



Yesterday in New Plymouth I walked around town and then found a park with some really cool plants and it was so green!  Since it was raining it felt like a huge rainforest.  My friend compared it to Jurassic Park.


In one section was this cool gazebo:


 Ok, off to figure out how to spend the rest of my rainy day here!

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