New Zealand

Hello Everyone, I made it to New Zealand safe and sound on October 17th. Dawna, Heidi and I spent our first night in Auckland and then rented a camper van for 10 days and toured the north end of the north island. In those ten days we went to the bay of islands and went on a dolphin cruise, went to 90 mile beach and went sand boarding, and went to the most northern point of NZ (Cape Reinga.) We spent a couple nights in Rotorua and went horse back riding in the outback with english saddles (I was pretty much in pain after 15 minutes.) Apparently English saddles are harder on you but easier on the horse. My fav thing that we did in Rotorua was go white water rafting! It was my first time and I LOVED IT! I'll def have to do more of that in the future! We made it down an 8 foot waterfall without flipping! This is just a very brief outline of some of the stuff that we did. We did a lot of just driving to different beaches that were absolutely BEAUTIFUL! We would drive and drive and camp and do fun stuff pretty much that's what we did. We also made a stop at Capernwray New Zealand in Cambridge which was really fun for me and Dawna because we both went to different capernwrays; and I was thinking about going to that one before I went to Thetis Island.
On Saturday the 27th we dropped off our campervan in Auckland and flew over to Great Barrier Island. This was quite the experience because when we went to get on the plane we're like "wow our plane is small" and then we realized that wasn't our plane and the actual plane we were going on was 10X smaller! We couldn't stop laughing it was so funny! There were eight seats and I was in the very back and my luggage was in the seat beside me. I think our pilate was younger than me and still in training! Our plane landed in a field in the middle of no where and Andrew, Kim and Matt picked us up and took us to Orama. We've been getting settled into our house; Dawna and I share a room, and Heidi and Kim share a room. Andrew and Matt live upstairs and we share a kitchen and bathroom and laundry with them. It's a really cute old house! On Sunday Kim's dad took us Ocean fishing and we caught over 20 mau mau. Kim's dad caught a lobster scuba diving so that night we had a feast. On monday we started working. In the morning we are either cleaning, watering the garden or making breakfast. In the afternoon we have work projects; I'm helping plant the garden this week and dawna and heidi were doing different projects. On Monday night Kim took us up to 3 kings and we did some beginner rock climbing:) We have one activities day a week so today we went on a 5 hour hike so I'm pretty tired I should probably go to bed. I'll try and update more often!