Saturday 17th November – Whitianga to Muriwai (eventually)

I’m not sure what I liked better. Waking up yesterday in a cosy bed with the sun streaming through the many windows, or waking up this morning to the default torrential rain and knowing that I didn't have to escape my sleeping bag, get my shoes on without being able to sit up completely and make the morning dash through the rain to have a wee in a pit toilet.

We skipped the Smith’s morning coffee routine just to have a bit more time to get the dull stuff sorted and avoid out-staying our welcome. We did end up with the opportunity to have a bonus chat with our mum’s though, which was super-nice given that we rarely get chance to these days due to the most awkward time difference yet and the fact that we can never seem to be able to coordinate a good enough connection with a charged laptop.

We spent a last 10 mins with Geoff and Lorna. Geoff was a very nice guy and it’s a shame we’re unlikely to see Lorna again because I would have loved to spend more time with her and get to know her better. We set off in the pouring rain towards Auckland. It’s like a different country to the sunny seaside of yesterday.

In Auckland city we parked up cheekily in Countdown carpark while Matt went to print out the advert for the car and my insurance forms. He came back to the car 20 minutes later because it wasn’t saved in the right place and then had to go back to the internet café.

The car park was covered in warning signs and I started getting a bit concerned about getting a ticket so I struck up a conversation with the parking inspector. He was a young guy from Dubai who liked to blow his own trumpet and with a bit of cooing and flattery I soon had a parking space and a friend for life.

Matt returned with the adverts and spent a bit more time having to write in the bits of his email address and phone number that the printer had cut off the end and then it was my turn to help out by walking around the city, asking the hostels to put them on their notice board.

I only had my flip flops on and the rain was making the streets super slippy so I was skidding all over the place looking for hostels, half of which didn't seem to exist. Eventually, I got down to my last 2 adverts and my brain finally noticed something that had been niggling at me – there was no price on the damn thing!  I re-did the rounds where I could be bothered and wrote the rest off.

We tried to dropped the last two adverts off in hostels in the further reaches of the city – it was reassuring to my ineffective but easily wounded sense of direction that Matt also found that some of them just weren't there and eventually left Auckland city about 5 hours later than we intended.

Relieved to finally be getting out of the city, we set the phone Sat Nav to a campsite in the Waitakere Range and looked forward to having some dinner and putting our feet up. Another few hours and three non-existent campgrounds later (the closet we got was a closed Christian camp) and we abandoned the Waitakere Range and headed 45mins down the road to Muriwai beach. We got there tired, hungry and with no energy to do anything other than collapse into bed – only to find the gates were locked just 10 minutes previously. Despite all of our efforts to be good and not wild camp, we ended up parking up on a residential street and sleeping in our clothes just in case we got moved on in the middle of the night.