10June06 Up to Auckland

10June06 Saturday

Last night we stayed at a Kiwi Campervan Park about 6 km up Taranaki from New Plymouth.  The campground is on farm site and during the summer you can hang out with the farmer and help milk his herd of over 100 cows.  He freshens all the cows at the same time so during the winter he doesn’t do any milking so we missed out on it.  We were the only ones in the park for the night and had the place completely to ourselves.  The bathrooms were very nice and one of the baths had a bathtub so Joan was really happy about that.  The kitchen was nice and the laundry was on the honor system and you left the coins in a box on the wall.

 

We had to go back through New Plymouth to pick up Hwy 3 and happened to see a Saturday Market going on and stopped to check it out.  There were vendors there with a wide variety of items for sale out of their trunks or pickups.  Joan bought a bouquet of flowers to put in the camper.  Then we drove by the model RR club facilities and took a couple of pictures of their place.  They apparently have a very small gauge steam train on which they give rides on Sundays.  Missed out on that one.

 

We left New Plymouth and drove on up to the Auckland suburb of Manukau and we checked into the Top 10 campground that we had stayed at when we were on the build there.  We went down to the local video store and rented a couple of videos, picked up a couple sandwiches at the Subway next door and headed back to the campground.  Will use some of the popcorn that our teammates left.

 

Today was a little longer drive as we did around 350 kms.  We didn’t take “The Forgotten World Highway” this time and had a pleasant drive.  Along the west shore of the Tasman Sea we went by an installation that apparently is generating methane.  We didn’t stop but now I am curious about what is going on there.  The company is called Methanex.  The map also had a spot offshore in that area marked as “synthetic fuel generation” but no other description.  Will have to ask around about that.

 

Tomorrow we will probably head back up north of Auckland.   We are planning to be back to see the Reyburns on Tuesday.