New Zealand
The Birches had already established that their flight wouldn’t arrive in time to collect their van on the Friday afternoon and had booked into an hotel. We thought that we were in with a shout and offloaded our hold luggage onto Richard, sneaking in under the wire but not without some seat of the pants decision making. We spent our first night with four in the van at the freedom camping site in Barry Curtis park – convenient for the Barry Curtis Parkrun the following morning, where we teamed up with the Birches who’d caught a bus to the event from their “Norman Bates” motel. After some shopping and shuttling back to Jucy, both campervans set off to Coromandel via the Botanic Gardens in Auckland.
Our next night was another Freedom site in Thames where Jo & Johnny got to test their recently acquired tent and where a daily 5k run regime was started. The next day, the highlight of a very pleasant lunchtime break at ?????????, was Richard rescuing Suse from the undertow and an Easter egg hunt.
Our evening halt in Coroglen Town was another Freedom spot in the middle of town with nowhere to pitch a tent. We pushed on to another Freedom spot at Coroglen calling in at a pretty waterfall. The next morning Jo & Johnny fell foul of the “Parkys” who along with an extra van which had turned up overnight and parked outwith the arrows were also fined $200. This made us rather nervous about future camping sites.
