WHANGAREI

Bay of Islands. Scratch that.
Whangarei will do.

This weekend we planned a little outing with Lena, Julianne, Jessica and I. We were headed north to Bay of Islands. We stopped at Snells Beach just on the skirts of Warkworth. The beach was covered in seashells..and the usual squawking seagull family. Nice though. Very nice..

Then we headed to Whangarei. Found a hostel with a beauty of a view and grabbed some Chinese takeaway and a couple bottles of wine to finish the night.
In the morning we drove to the Whangarei waterfalls. WOW! That’s all I got to say for that one. The pictures do no justice. Actually half the pictures I take do no justice to the real thing. Its like I can capture what I see, and it can be the most beautiful picture of whatever the scene. But to me, it shows no comparison to what it appears in real life. Its funny how that works. Even with the best camera I don’t think it could happen.

After the falls we headed out of town to Bay of Islands. Got about 30 minutes out with hrm. Smoke starts steaming out the hood of the car. Yep. “Shit” is right. The car dies and we are stranded on the side of the road with a few cows on one side and speeding cars on the other. People here don’t care if your hazards are on and your car is halfway on the road. They just keep speeding on ward.
A nice old man stopped to see if we were all right. He called his tow friend who used to be a mechanic and that’s when Roy came to the rescue. Roy shows up in the tow truck. A man of 60+ wearing some short shorts with socks pulled up and boots. Oh and a nice black sweater. It was classic. Pretty much what I live for.

Roy looked the engine over and well. Bad news. What I figured, but just didn’t want to say.
[Mom I’m turning into you. At least that’s what it felt like in this situation. I, out of the four of us girls was the only one that could make since of what was wrong with the engine. Too bad I didn’t know how to fix it, that’s when I wish you were with us.]
The damage was either fix the engine for over two grand or buy a new engine for $1500. I’ll cut the story short because the rest consists of hours of discussion to figure out what to do and well. Roy finally just saying “how bout I just charge you $100 for the tow and I take the car back to my farm myself.” He had a deal and we all got to have our first bus ride back to Auckland. But I should add that the whole way back into town in the tow truck, we saw like 5 or a dozen rainbows. We were just like you’ve got to be kidding me. Alls well that ends well I guess.


Now if anyone wants to contribute to the Samantha New Zealand fund that would be great.