Leaving the South, What about the North?

We left the South Island this morning.  We had breakfast overlooking red and purple
rhododendron bushes and a horse in his stylish coat in the paddock.  And headed out
to the airport in Christchurch.

I do not know much about cricket, but Christchurch is excited to be the site for the cricket World Cup in 2015 - see the exhibit at the airport.

We grabbed a 2014 Rave 4 at the Auckland airport and dashed north.  We had reservations at Paihia at the Bay of Islands tonight and it was a LONG drive.  We did not get the GPS with this car, so we were navigating from the maps that we had.  It was a drastic change from the South Island.  Auckland has 1.4 million people, 32% of the New Zealand population.  We went from one lane bridges to 8

lanes on the Harbor Bridge in Auckland.

As we left Auckland, we were back in rural

rolling pastures and dairy farms.  We saw herds of cows in line on a path towards the milking barns. The cows knew when it was time to go for milking and were on their way.


There was a lot of traffic headed north including double trailer milk trucks, farm fuel trucks, huge horse trailers and school buses. In Whangarei we passed the huge Fonterra dairy processing plant where all the trucks were heading.

In all this heavy traffic, we were surprised to see triple trailer trucks. These were trucks loaded with timber. 

Headed north on highway#1, we saw Bream Head rising out of the Pacific Ocean, a dramatic sight.





Finally four hours after leaving the airport, we drove into Paihia, a small seacoast town where the original treaty of Waitangi  was signed in 1840 between the English and the Maori.  They have wide swing of tides here, and the pier for local activity boats had floating docks that looked like they could rise significantly as the tide came in.