New Zealand Adventures, Part 2
Enjoy this round-up from our New Zealand adventures these past few days!
Day 2, Continued…
The afternoon of our Day 2 in New Zealand, we continued the beach theme (see previous blog post!) but this time we had to hike 90 minutes round trip to get there! The world-famous Cathedral Cove is a fairly active hike up and down through a semi-rainforest, a pine forest and finally 150 stairs down to the absolutely stunning beach vista used in the farewell scene of the Pevensie children in the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Gorgeous!
After that, we drove around the Coromandel Peninsula, looking for New Zealand ice cream in the town of Whitianga. Although we got there after 5pm, and the only ice cream shop was closed, we did find a convenience store still open which sold ice cream. (We are quite surprised at how early the stores close, here! But as our daughter pointed out, it allows the shop workers to be home with their families for dinner, which is probably a much healthier expectation than the USA version of staying open until 8 or 9 pm!). After ice cream (doing things backward!), we got meat pies for dinner. This is our new favorite food! Picture a single-size chicken pot pie but with every conceivable meat filling, and available fresh and hot at every convenience store, bakery and gas station!
Stayed overnight at an adorable stand-alone motel unit bungalow with 2 bedrooms, at a ‘Holiday Park’ (a campground that also has bungalows). What an amazing day.
Day 3 – Driving Down the Entire Length of the North Island to Wellington!
This was a long, meandering driving day through the gorgeous countryside of New Zealand. We drove from the northern tip of Coromandel Peninsula, quite far north in the country, all the way to the southern tip of the North Island. New Zealand is two large land masses – the North and South Islands. We couldn’t do both in the roughly 6 days we have, so we concentrated on the North Island. The drive was beautiful, although quite long because except around the two major cities, New Zealand doesn’t have a big highway system! So we were driving along the equivalent of Route 66 in the US, meandering through small towns en route. Which is what made a long driving day (almost 12 hours) quite fun!
We ate meat pies (of course) in a little bakery on the way, and later passed the beautiful Lake Taupo, crowned by a beautiful horizon-to-horizon rainbow.
Jeff and I finally feel like we got the hang of driving on the left hand side of the road without having to think about it every moment. We must confess, though, that we were very glad to pull into Wellington at 9:15 pm, before the front desk of our lodge closed at 9:30! We were ready to stretch out and rest!
Day 4 – Wellington and Weta Studios!
Today is one of those bucket-list days for me, so forgive the long post on this! As a movie fan (I am one of those people who always watches the behind-the-scenes features on the making of the movie, on our movie DVDs!) I have for YEARS wanted to tour Weta Studios/Workshop. These folks are the geniuses behind the special effects in many of our favorite blockbusters…not just the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but Avatar, lots of Marvel movies (The Avengers, Iron Man), Narnia movies, etc.
So I woke up this morning as excited as a kid at Christmas, to be totally honest about just how big of a movie nerd I am! 
