The Homestretch

Today was the beginning of the final group excursion as a group before we leave. It is absolutely crazy to think that I only have 8 days left in New Zealand and then I’ll be off to Australia until the 12^th of April! It’s insane how fast time flies.

This last excursion is as far north as we can get, the Bay of Islands. We are in a little town called Paihai. It is a weird combination of a small town but a big tourist attraction.

  

We began our day by waking up ridiculously early. We were told that the Ramona, Chris, and James were going to start making the rounds at 7am to pick us up. Kirsten and I live the farthest away from everybody else and right off of the freeway on the way out so we assumed that we would be last. That would make logical sense right? 6:40 rolled around and we got a creepy tap on our front window, then the bathroom window and then to ice the cake on our bedroom window. It is completely pitch black outside so we couldn’t see anything. Naturally we began to completely freak out. We were already a little freaked out because even earlier at about 6am Phyllis had woken up and dropped something very loud in the kitchen. And then she started unloading the dishwasher. Frankly speaking the sound resembled crashing cars. So this experience of creepy taps on the window really just added to the spookiness of the situation. It might have just been spooky because we were just starting to wake up, but then again it was just plain old creepy.

So the van got to our place at 6:40 when Ramona had called us and told us that we were going to be picked up starting at 7. We weren’t ready in the slightest and so we literally had time to change out of our pj’s and brush our teeth and then run out the door. Great right?

It turned out okay because we realized that we were going to swim with dolphins that afternoon! How neat is that? It was going to be worth it waking up really early.

So we arrived and we are staying at another hostel called X-Base just like we stayed in when we were in Queenstown. This one fortunately is much, much nicer. It’s laid out in a much more motel like situation vs. the hallways of rooms with beds in it. It even has a pool and a not so hot, hot tub! We were all pretty excited about that. It’s weird how we have beautiful beaches around and all we have wanted to do is swim in a pool.

And then we had a joyous ride to Paihai and got to the place where the boat was going to take off to swim with the dolphins. They then told us that there was no guarantee that we were going to be able to actually get in the water. Actually they told us it was a very slim chance that we were going to be able to get in the water because it was so windy. This would of just been too dangerous and the whole point of going to see the dolphins was to swim with them…so we changed our minds about going today and decided to rebook ourselves for Monday! This will be the coolest way to end our trip here in New Zealand.