Thursday, December 1, 2016

Day 6 – Taupo to Auckland via Hamilton

It had to happen. We had a day of disaster upon disaster today. It all started with Carly having a shocker of a night with minimal sleep, lots of coughing, some (ahem) vomiting, and ending with sleeping in the bath. Poor thing, she was not operating on all cylinders as we packed up and headed off for breakfast. Make sure you check out the photos to compare our breakfasts – I had smashed avocado & tomato with poached egg and bacon while Carly had plain cream cheese on a plain bagel. Regardless, it was yummy…again…thank you Trip Advisor.

So we set off for our first activity – a two hour drive away. There was no party atmosphere with actions for 90s rap songs today. Carly caught up on sleep – I must admit I felt a bit like the clock had turned back 30 years to her baby years – to get her to sleep, just go for a drive! So it was raining and I was driving on winding back roads. We passed two crashes, one with a car flipped over by the side of the road, so I drove quite conservatively. The Sat Nav finally said we had arrived but unfortunately we were in the middle of nowhere. Hmm. A quick check found we had put the wrong road name in so we were off course…but not too far…so a mere 15 minutes later we arrived at the Glow Worm Caves. Calamity! The glow worm tours were all booked up for hours! So, we decided to do a different cave – we raced and just caught the 10:30am tour. Great! Except as we started to go into the cave, Carly realised that there were heights involved and she decided she did not feel well enough to face that stress so she bailed out and sat outside the cave for an hour and a half! It was a very interesting tour and I took heaps of photos so that she could check it out later. Poor Carly!

After that disaster we decided to head on over to Hamilton to check out their famous Gardens. Once again Carly took the opportunity to snooze and an hour later we were pulling in to the car park. Still not feeling well, Carly struggled but we were able to spend 45 minutes or so pleasantly exploring some very nice themed gardens.

It was only an hour and a half to Auckland. We had originally planned that we would drive to the airport, return the car, and then get a bus with our bags to our hotel. I could see this was going to be too much for Carly – poor thing was still not well. So, change of plan – we would drive to the hotel, I would drop Carly and the bags off, drive to the airport, drop the car off, and catch a bus back to the hotel. We left Hamilton a bit after 2pm, and I got back to the hotel at about 7pm. OMG – traffic jam capital of the world! Anyway, we finally made it, somewhat battle scarred, maybe down, but not out! Tomorrow is another day.

Room service, a hot bath, and an early night me thinks.

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