Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

The cicada will sing us to sleep tonight as we seem to have one hiding in our room. We have just 3 nights left in New Zealand. The time has flown in some respects and yet it felt just right in other respects. Tomorrow we check out of this hostel and check into our airport motel and we will spend the next couple days tying up the loose ends with the sale of the car and closing our bank account. We've sold the main things we wanted to sell and we've even found a couple little souvenirs to take with us. Every time I wandered a souvenir shop though, none of the trinkets could really encapsulate how I feel about the place. None would even come close. I've actually been fairly melancholy about the fact that we're leaving. I certainly feel a connection here that I'm not ready to let go of. But, plans have been made and we'll stick to them. It will give us time to think more about our vision for our next few years. We've decided to wait until we've been back to...

Trigger Fish Snapper When the shark fought Dustin right around the boat! It's a kina bro! You eat the insides and Dustin tried it on his dive. Too bad the divemaster got to take that home

Rainbow Falls: it's not just a clever name We caught about 1m of snapper that day. As you can see, some had to be thrown back.

So Far So Good - an unintentional tribute to Bryan Adams This is our best friend Terry who took us all over New Zealand.

The night we moved our tent in the middle of the night to escape the flooding. White Island off the coast of the Bay of Plenty. It's an active volcano. Gorgeous carvings outside a school Te Puke is major kiwi-growing country. They have a lot of themed signs. It's great. Sunset with some wine. No Dustin didn't grow a moustache.

This was out WWOOFing stop in later February. It was south of Gisborne near Mahunga and Mahia. It was a huge sheep farm and accommodation. We biked for about 20 minutes and weren't even at the edge of the property yet. Not a bad view from the office. Ms. Ali Good ol' Baxter

We went to the Tui brewery on Valentine's day. It was about 11am and Dustin was quite happy because we got to be the first to write in the new guestbook and he wrote that he took his wife to the brewery for Valentine's Day.