Lost In Translation

Wow! I have so much to tell you guys, and just no time to sit down and write. Luckily for you guys I have a shit day of a lot of driving and a fully charged laptop battery so I am going to try and bang out some entries while in transit. I should be sleeping because I haven't the time to do that either, but hey, you can sleep when your dead! So some of you might be thinking, “Geeze, she has only been travelling for 2 days she must be exaggerating about all the stuff she has to talk about.” I assure you I am not, it has been a full on 2 days of greatness!

I started this trip in Auckland ear-lie in the morning! I had to be at the station for 7:00am, which involved me getting up at 5:00am getting ready and taking the bus down to catch my Magic Bus. Also I am going to go ahead and put my J-Mo stamp of approval on this tour company. It is a great deal, great people, they make wonderful stops and take care of a lot of booking for you. So I rolled up to the station ready for adventure, and being the eager beaver I am I was the first one there. I pulled up a seat and took a load off until the bus got there. Then a young fella came in with his life on his back too. He sat down by me and asked where I was from. I said Canada and he said he was from Victoria. I am always happy to converse with fellow Canadians so we started chatting. Within a half a minute I realized he was not my people. He might as well have been from Toronto. It didn't help his case that he just turned 20 and he thought it was funny to make fun of my east coast accent.. I always get disappointed when I meet people like that because I don't want those ignoramuses representing our great nation! Anyway, then it was on to the bus to pick up some other peeps before hitting the road to Rotorua. We picked up another girl at the Base with a Uof A sweatshirt on so I knew she was another Canadian. We also picked up this funny English guy that stumbled onto the bus with his belt in his hand and blood shot eyes who was obviously a bit dishevelled this morning. Turns out he was out with some friends until 6 and 7:30am came a little quicker then he thought it might! Haha! He seems like good people though! So after out pick ups our driver, Kate, hit the road headed for Rotorua.

Along the way we stopped in three spots. The first was a place called Thames, we had to drop some people off there that were headed to the Coromandel (which I will be doing at some point in this year) and it was a chance to get out have a pee break and stretch. We didn't have very long in Thames but from the looks of things we weren't missing much. It is just a small little town that people probably stop in when in transit to better places. It is also the gateway to the Coromandel. Our next stop was in Paeroa. This town is famous for one thing, L&P. L&P is a famous New Zealand soda that was created in Paeroa. In fact that is what the P stands for. The L stands for lemon because how it was developed was they put lemon in the spring water from Paeroa and named it L&P. I have tried it, and it is quite good. It is like a carbonated lemonade with sugar. So we stopped there and got our picture taken with the giant L&P bottle they have there. It was also a good chance to get out and stretch our legs and pee if you needed to. Then it was back on the road for our next stop for lunch, and I was also able to put another check on the list!

We stopped for lunch in a little town called Hobbiton, maybe you've heard of it! I wold like to draw your attention to number 24 on the list: “Get in touch with your inner nerd and run through Hobbiton humming or singing the Lord of the Rings theme song.” Well I had to modify this a bit because to go to the actual hobbiton movie set thing you have to pay a pretty good price and you have to sign a waiver saying that you won't post any photos online until after the release of the Hobbit movie coming up. So, I wanted to save my money, we didn't have a whole lot of time, and I wouldn't even be able to post a picture of me checking off the list. Not to mention that because of my complete lack of interest in Lord of the Rings I don't know the theme song off the top of my head, so I compromised and took my picture with the Hobbiton sign instead. I did, however, get in touch with my inner nerd and felt the epicness that is Hobbiton. Also, spoiler alert, I will be going to “Mount Doom” today so I will have another opportunity to get in touch with my inner nerd then too. So I am going to count that as a check! I also was able to have lunch in Hobbiton across the road from the rolling green hills and sheep. Did you know that in NZ there is 9 sheep per person, and they have over 4 million people in the country. That is a lot of sheep! After lunch in Hobbiton we headed to Rotorua where we would spend the night. Now, because of the immense amount of things I have taken in I am breaking up blogging so it is not a massive read for you guys. It also allows you guys to get more detail about the stuff I am doing, and therefore be able to feel like you have been there with me! The next one will be about Rotorua and all the wonderful things I was able to take in there. Be warned though, it will be long, I did some pretty amazing stuff and I won't skimp on the deets!