Sunday in New Zealand

We are giving all the claps to Air New Zealand. They served us TWO hot meals, offered decent leg room in economy class, and piped Taylor Swift into the bathrooms (which were a fine size and remarkably clean for being airplane bathrooms).

We landed about 6am Sunday in Auckland, which was about 11am Saturday back home. We felt pretty good getting off the plane; we had each gotten sleep.

After getting our passports stamped, we headed toward baggage claim to grab Tim's surfboards. We also had "items to declare:" New Zealand is very careful about what comes into the country, and the fact that we had packaged food (granola bars, trail mix) and outdoor gear (surfboards) meant we had to get processed by their biosecurity agents. However, the line for biosecurity was loooong, and after about 10 minutes in line, an agent came along and released all the LA travelers. Turns out there were other inbound flights that were higher in priority for biosecurity processing -- namely from Bali.

Once in the arrivals area of the airport, we grabbed some coffee and our rental car keys and took in our first sights of Auckland. 

We didn't see much of Auckland though, because we had plans to drive two and a half hours to a special beach.

Tim did the driving, and so I'm going to pause here and give him major kudos because a). jet lag; b). time change; and c). driving on the left side of the road while jet lagged and tired. 👏👏He just made one wrong turn down the wrong side of a road...and it was a quick course correction. No biggie.

In our car rental at the Auckland airport. It's a Hyundai Staria van because, you know, surfboards.

Fifteen minutes later...

About halfway through the drive, we stopped in a tiny town and ate lunch. It was rainy and cool and gray, and the woman working as cashier at the restaurant said, "It's such a gloomy day but it's quite comforting." And I thought that was the most New Zealand thing to say and lapped it up.

After lunch and another hour of driving, we pulled up to Hot Water Beach, a famous beach on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula. Hot Water Beach gets its name from underground hot springs that filter up through the sand between the high and low water tidal reaches. Within two hours either side of low tide, visitors can dig into the sand, which enables hot water to escape to the surface and form a hot water pool. The water temperature can get up to 147 °F (no joke). 

We got to Hot Water Beach around noon, quickly changed into bathing suits, rented a couple shovels, and walked down to where the crowd was. There were so many people hanging out in these hot water pools. We tried digging our own pool but were too far removed from the underground hot springs and never found hot water. Instead, we squeezed ourselves into an existing pool...and literally scalded our feet within seconds. That water was SO hot. The four of us eventually lowered ourselves into the pool and sat there until we couldn't anymore. The whole thing was wild.

Hot Water Beach at low tide.

Taylor and Tim digging for hot water.

Me after putting my feet in the hot water pool and running back out: "That's REALLY hot water!"

Wyatt going for one last sit in the hot water pool before getting out.
(Look how pink the soles of his feet are!)

We piled back in the car and drove another 10 minutes to Hahei Beach, where Tim had booked us at the Hahei Beach Resort. This place is home for one night, and we have this teeny, little trailer that fits a queen bed, bunk beds, a bathroom and shower, kitchenette, and small table. I am feeling major IKEA vibes.

After checking us into the Beach Resort, Tim happened across a dad with three young girls. All of the girls were holding hands, and the dad was leading them in song: "We get what we get and we don't get upset." They had clearly just walked in from town. Tim is now adamant that that song lyric will serve as our family life motto. 

Once in our tiny trailer, we showered and changed and did our best to stay awake. We walked into town about 4pm to buy ourselves some time before dinner -- but town was a general store, a couple other stores, and closed art galleries. We popped into a restaurant about 4:30pm and ate some delicious pizza.

Give us pizza, then give us bed.

By 6:30pm, we were lights out, down for the count.

We're excited about traveling through New Zealand's North Island over the next nine days. On our drive today, we remarked about how green this place is, how many cows and sheep we saw, and how few towns and people we saw (there are only five million people in the entire country). 

We'll be blogging along the way -- I think it's tradition at this point -- and there will probably be some featured posts by Wyatt (#iykyk).

By the way, our blog name? Wyatt came up with it. Non-Stop New Zealand: let's go! (After some quality sleep, of course...)