Welly

Ello Mates,

It's a beautiful sunny day in Welly this afternoon.

This trip has started out not quite as relaxed as I would have hoped. We picked up Mike's friend who I had actually met a few times at A&M from the airport. She is currently a student down in Christchurch for the year. She has been a big help in Mike and I getting to know New Zealand.

We rented a Nissan Bluebird, a sweet little car with some character. It was really exciting, driving on the wrong side of the road, half way across the world, whoohooo.

We stayed with her boyfriend's college buddy for the night, a "first class mate". That's how he described Mike and I, and we felt the same about him.

From Auckland we drove up to Bay of Islands a beautiful place full of small jutting land masses surrounded by wonderful expanses of blue. The only problem was that a cyclone was off the island of Fiji or something, and so the skys were gray and the weather was wet. Went on a sweet hike to a waterfall and some mangroves.

From there on to Coromandel peninsula and Hot water beach. This was supposed to be just a really sweet spot where you dig in the sand and make your own hot tub from heated water from hot spots left from volcanic activity. But to our chagrin we were met with a sign that said we couldn't because of the weather.

Then on to Lake Taupo. The biggest lake in all of NZ.

We were almost there, 10k to go, when as we pulled out in front of and got nicked by a log truck. Yikes! Getting nicked by a log truck still did a fair amount of damage to our poor Bluebird. But we barely noticed it. Hitting a pothole earlier in trip shook up the car more than than this did.

So we were all super fine, I thought the truck was going to miss us entirely, it was close. Anyways, the bumper got totally knocked off and the right rear was smashed. We got our first NZ cop experience also, he was very pleasant.

The short version: the car is "unfit to drive", so we left it in Taupo.

Taupo was a neat little place. Had a nice time hanging out there.

Now we are in Wellington staying with some other friends of friends. The car is all taken care of. Mike's shoulder is feeling better. And things are good. Mike and I had a good chat about what God was doing with our pride and lives on the bus ride, and that was great.

Tomorrow we leave for the South Island!

Thanks so much everyone