Hey everybody! So the last time I left you we were about to start apple picking... Well, a lot has happened since then!
First a few pictures from Auckland I didn't get to post yet.
I gave Dar and haircut and a beardcut.
And we had an amazing adventure and epic hike with Amy on Rangitoto.
We were all a little tired out after the walk.
Anyway back to where I last left you. We were living with Chatwell, this crazy cockatoo.
Went to this really cool festival in Napier, the closest larger town to Hastings. In the 1920's they had this really bad earthquake, and since so much rebuilding was done after it, the town is famous for being full of art deco. So each year they have art deco weekend, where seriously like 80% of the people on the street are dressed up in 1920's clothes, people drive around in 20's era cars, and they have a big free concert with 20's music.
We found a duck car!
But this was my favorite one.
The NZ Army showed up.
We picked apples for about 3 days, and at $35 per bin, if you pick pretty quickly you can make a fair amount of money....
But we weren't very fast. We averaged about $5 per hour (minimum wage is $13.50) so we quit after only 3 days!
After we left apple picking, we went back to the vineyard we worked on in Hastings, but he didn't have any work for us. So, we spent a few days playing around the area...
We went to go have lunch by the river one day and saw this thing floating down the river. It's a haka, a traditional Maori war boat. And when we went to go look at it up close, they offered to take us out for a ride in it!
One day we found ourselves at this recycling event called 'Junk to Funk' which was held at the studio of an artist who makes recycled artwork. Basically everyone brought any crap they didn't want anymore, and people got creative and made stuff. Super Eugene. This was the 'funk' table of the things people had made from stuff on the 'junk' table.
There were some pretty weird ones too.
I made a hat. There's also a picture somewhere on fb of me wearing it. It's made of a cookie tin lid, some old fabric, part of a wicker chair, fishing line, the plastic tubes used to make bottles, and some hair curlers.
And one afternoon, after a couple days pondering our next move, we read an ad online that there was vineyard work on the south island in Blenheim, an area we'd planned on going for before we ended up in Hastings. So at around 3 in the afternoon, we decided to just go. We got tickets on the 2am ferry, we filled a plastic bag with things for the op shop, threw the rest in our bags, and bee-lined it for Wellington. We slept some in the ferry terminal, tied adventure bike all up safe and sound at the bottom of the boat, curled up to a sci-fi movie at 3 am, and sailed on over the south!
Unfortunately, the guy I'd talked to on the phone who said there would be winery work if I called back, never answered the phone again, and we ended up sleeping on some gravel outside a hostel waiting for the managers to show up. But, by the afternoon we'd found a different hostel and more vineyard work. Horray!
We didn't end up staring work for the first few days, so we spent some time driving around checking out the place.
Dar showed me how to break rocks since he is so well versed in it from growing up as a little boy.
There were some cool bugs too.
We started vineyard work again, but the memorable part was spending time with the friends we met. We were in the smallest town ever, and we were living super budget to try and save money, but we found this golf course that cost only $10 per person to golf. So one Sunday, we went golfing!
No one had any idea what they were doing.
Seriously me having golfed a couple times as a kid was the most experienced golfer.
We quickly learned that there was a reason the golf course was so cheap... The whole place was COVERED in sand flies (gnats that bite) and a heard of sheep that lived on the course left many little presents on the greens.
One day Dar surprised me with a picnic lunch at a farm park close by!
The town at the bottom of the picture is Blenheim.
Our last job was on a vineyard.
And there was this moment, working on the vineyard where Dar says to me:
"Do you want to quit?"
"Today?"
"Yeah, today."
"Ummm... Yes."
And when I took a moment to think about it, I'd been spending all day staring at the grape vines trying to make sure I found every last green one, and I looked up from my work, and saw this.
And I just went, Holy shit! What am I doing here doing this work? Why am I not enjoying this beautiful country and working doing a job I actually like in the US? This makes no sense!
So we quit that job too! And now we will just travel and not work again until we get back to the US.
Next we decided to head back up to Picton to go see the sounds at the top of the north island. It was way beautiful!
It was a bit of a rough ride on the motorbike....
We spent the night in a hostel in Picton where some really friendly Maori guys kept giving us beers, and Dar got a little braggy about how much alcohol he could drink. So they put him to a challenge.
We also met our 3rd friend named Lars, this one a crazy viking who makes motorbikes. He was a hoot!
We said bye to Picton the next morning, and headed for the Queen Charlotte Track and Nelson
We walked a bit on the track, and found some pretty stuff! Some people do 3 or 4 day hikes on this track, but we don't have any camping gear, so we did just a 3 or 4 hour short hike.
Found this cool flightless bird
And a blonde ducky!
No pictures from this part, but as we headed on over to Nelson I got off the bike at one point and realized I couldn't feel the upper half of one of my legs. I walked, jumped, and ran around for 30 minutes at this campground trying to get feeling back, but it wouldn't get better. It was really weird. And the next morning, when I still couldn't feel my leg, I decided I better go to the doctor and get it checked out. Turns out riding on the motorbike with all of our stuff for so long caused me to pinch a nerve, and it took almost a week for the feeling to come back!
We got really good news the other day. Dar got accepted into the Physics masters program at UO! So we had a celebratory lunch at a yummy Indian restaurant (This is also right after I found out there wasn't something majorly wrong with my leg!)
Some celebratory cappuccinos
And Dar took a celebratory ride on the boogie train!
The next day we headed up on the motorbike from Nelson to Motueka, where we hung out at a beach,
We found some really amazing tide pools with starfish, blennys, snails, and hermits. Salt water nerd out time!
The next day we headed up to Abel Tasman, the national park near Motueka. It was an incredibly beautiful place.
And after 3 months of beautiful sunny days, the day we decide to go see Abel Tasman, they had the first rain.
We saw some really cute seals though!
And this is called split apple rock.
There is a huge swing bridge in the middle of the park that we walked across.
And after Abel Tasman, as we planned to head onto the long and now quite rainy stretches of the South Island, it came time to say goodbye to adventure bike. So we gave her a good bath...
And yesterday, I took her for a last ride, and gave her a big hug goodbye so we could continue on adventuring.
Now we are hitchikers!
We'll spend the next 3 weeks exploring the south island, then making our way back to Auckland, where we catch a flight to Gold Coast on April 11th! Our itinerary looks like this:
Thursday April 11 - Auckland -> Gold Coast
Friday April 19 - Gold Coast -> Phuket
Thursday May 2 - Bangkok ->Tokyo
Friday May 10 - Tokyo ->Seoul
Monday May 20 - Seoul ->Shanghai
Tuesday May 21- Shanghai -> Honolulu
Saturday May 25 - Honolulu -> Eugene
Really excited to see my friend Takako in Japan! Also a friend I met here in NZ will be in Tokyo at the same time! We've set up a bit of couch surfing in Australia and Thailand, so there should be a ton of adventure there too!
So we've spent a night in Hanmer Springs, a night in Chirstchurch, and now we're headed wherever our thumbs take us! We're shipping our computers away today, so this will probably be the last post with lots of pictures, but probably some phone pictures will still come up once in awhile :)
Bonus points for whoever can tell me what this car has done to make these tracks.
And bonus picture for today: A little ghetto NZ. Poor shopping cart didn't deserve it's untimely end.
